Book Review: The Winter's Child by Cassandra Parkin

First, a big thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for the ARC I was given in exchange for my fair and honest review.

Boy, do I have some thoughts on this one.

Anyone want to guess how long it took me just to decide on the star rating on Goodreads? Short answer: I'm still deliberating over whether I made the right choice.

Here's my problem: this is one those rare books where I legitimately don't know if I want to give it a four or a two, so I split the difference, give it a three, and feel really off about it because I know that whether I skew positive or skew negative, it doesn't deserve a three. Let me break this down for you: the book was well-written. There are beautifully crafted (but not overdone) descriptions, the characters are mostly very well-developed (and when they're not, I recognize that it's my own personal feelings that make me want more of Nick, but it would've been a bad plot move), and a lot of the moments feel very authentic. The central conflict--which I'd ay revolves around the protagonist's self doubt about her relationship with her ex-husband more than anything to do with her missing son--feels incredibly authentic. So much can most parents relate, in fact, that at times even that authenticity can't save us because it's too familiar. It's familiar enough that it's in basically every book ever: the mom is too lenient and doesn't support the dad, who wants more discipline. Okay. We've got it. It's not a bad book, but this particular problem is not even close to original.

"Then," you ask, "Why the desire to give it two stars?"

Well, I'll tell you: the book was mostly boring and it ended by going off the rails. For a relatively short book (under 300 pages), the pacing felt super slow, especially towards the end. The climactic scene, the one where Susannah finally sees how wrong she'd been about what she assumed happened, felt like it would never end. Seriously, no spoilers, but if that daggone psychic said he was scared one more time, I would've been tempted to lose my mind. I want my thrillers to be thrilling; I don't want to be constantly checking my percentage to see how much more I have to plow through to get to the totally unsurprising ending. I have read some reviews that said that ending was surprising and I have constructed a list of reasons to explain that phenomenon:

1) Those reviewers have never read (or seen) a thriller.
2) Those reviewers skipped the last third of the book that gave giant, flashing warnings about the upcoming ending.
3) Those reviewers are lying.

In short, I wouldn't really recommend this book as it just wasn't very entertaining. After really working through my thoughts in this review, I'm skewing more towards 2/5 stars.