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Thursday, May 19, 2016

Night Film by Marisha Pessl--DNF Review




On a damp October night, beautiful young Ashley Cordova is found dead in an abandoned warehouse in lower Manhattan. Though her death is ruled a suicide, veteran investigative journalist Scott McGrath suspects otherwise. As he probes the strange circumstances surrounding Ashley’s life and death, McGrath comes face-to-face with the legacy of her father: the legendary, reclusive cult-horror-film director Stanislas Cordova—a man who hasn’t been seen in public for more than thirty years.

For McGrath, another death connected to this seemingly cursed family dynasty seems more than just a coincidence. Though much has been written about Cordova’s dark and unsettling films, very little is known about the man himself.

Driven by revenge, curiosity, and a need for the truth, McGrath, with the aid of two strangers, is drawn deeper and deeper into Cordova’s eerie, hypnotic world.

The last time he got close to exposing the director, McGrath lost his marriage and his career. This time he might lose even more. (Taken from Goodreads.com)


I DNF'd this book at about 230 pages.

I was so hyped up for this book and was bored. What kind of murder mystery thriller is boring? I get that it's slow going and it's very character driven...but the characters were so flat and uninteresting. I didn't care what happened to any of them to be perfectly honest.

I think the premise is really good...I love most of the things this book was about. Murder, crazy cult films, curses and possibly witchcraft, multimedia story telling and all that jazz. But for me, it was done in a way that when we found new clues and met new people with information, I was like...."Wooo?" I had nothing to get excited about. I didn't even care about trying to solve the mystery on my own either. I just wanted something interesting. ANYTHING. I couldn't even find the book app so that I could find the hidden messages in the ravens (or were they crows? Whatever). I don't know if it was because I was using an android (though they said there was an app for android) or because no one used it, but I couldn't find it anywhere and it was a huge disappointment...

I also thought that the writing was a bit much. Yes, it was really poetic and lovely to read, but sometimes I felt like it was trying to hard to be poignant and evoke feelings. It just ended up being wordy to me and taking me out of the story. She found ways to describe anything and everything, even if it didn't need a Film-noir-esque description. It felt like an old detective drama.

I tried so many times to read this book, and I just don't think it's going to happen. At first it was curiosity that kept me reading. I was bored, but I hoped that it would pick up. I mean, I DID want to know what happened to Ashley and meet her crazy family. But then I realized that I don't even really care what happened to her and I didn't want to meet her dad and his crazy followers. Maybe it's just not my genre or maybe it's just me (because again I'm in the minority). Maybe I have become too over critical of the things I've been reading? I don't know, but either way, I do not regret my choice to DNF this.