A canny young woman is struggling to survive by perpetrating various levels of mostly harmless fraud. On a rainy April morning, she is reading auras at Spiritual Palms when Susan Burke walks in. A keen observer of human behavior, our unnamed narrator immediately diagnoses beautiful, rich Susan as an unhappy woman eager to give her lovely life a drama injection. However, when the “psychic” visits the eerie Victorian home that has been the source of Susan’s terror and grief, she realizes she may not have to pretend to believe in ghosts anymore. Miles, Susan’s teenage stepson, doesn’t help matters with his disturbing manner and grisly imagination. The three are soon locked in a chilling battle to discover where the evil truly lurks and what, if anything, can be done to escape it. – Goodreads
If you’ve been reading for awhile, you know that I love Gillian Flynn. LOVE her. She can do no wrong in my eyes! Until now.
First off, when this book showed up on my doorstep & I opened it, I felt SO jipped! I guess it’s my fault for not reading the fine print & actually seeing how many pages the book actually is… but seriously. This book is TINY and is only 62ish pages long. If I put my entire hand over the front of the book, it would be almost completely covered, that’s how small it is. If it were normal-sized, I’m betting it would be maybe 20 pages long. If that! Maybe this photo will help…
Anyway! The size and length of the book itself was not even the most disappointing thing that happened. The story… it just wasn’t good. It wasn’t what I’ve come to expect from Flynn. I finished it in less than an hour and it was very, very underwhelming. I get that it’s a short story, so there’s only so much character building that can be done but it just felt like she wrote it in an hour and sent it off and was done with it. I wasn’t pulled in by the story like I usually am, I honestly just wanted to get to the end and see what twists she came up with… but there weren’t any. It was more confusing than anything. I finished reading and just sat there, not in awe but in disappointment and utter confusion about what I just wasted an hour reading.
I ended up rating The Grownup 2/5 stars on Goodreads and it honestly makes me weary of anything else she has coming out – according to Goodreads though, there isn’t anything… and maybe that’s for the best.
lifebetweenreads.com 