A Long Story With Not Much Happening...

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Well.... there is a lot to say about this book. But not as much as the author had to say to get to the point.

I really struggled with this one. Like, by the 35% mark I was bored and considering DNFing the book. So I started skimming. Then at about the 65% mark I started skimming bigger chunks, and by 80% I was basically just reading the parts where the characters engaged in dialogue.

This is an extremely slow moving book, definitely character driven as opposed to plot driven, and all of the characters were detestable. I'm not sure I've ever hated any character as much as I loathed the ones in this book. I couldn't connect to any of the characters and frankly, they all were so self-absorbed and rude and just all around horrible, I couldn't imagine them being real people. I also had a hard time since NONE of the family members had a connection to each other at all, and they actively avoided each other throughout most of the book.

I think the idea behind this book was really interesting and I'm really disappointed that I didn't like it. It just felt like there was no real direction this book was going. Sure there were some twists at the end, but not really anything jaw dropping. I wasn't surprised by anything in this book, and maybe that is part of my dislike of this book. I kept waiting for a big reveal or big moment or something to happen to make this book worth while and it just didn't happen for me. I honestly don't know what the point of the book was because the "latecomer" was such a small part of this story to me that it seems absurd that the book is entitled "the Latecomer." We didn't even know much about the "latecomer" until part three, in which the POV switches to her, and that was at nearly the 75% mark. Before that, she was mentioned in passing maybe a handful of times.

Anyway, I just don't think this was the right book for me, so take my review with a grain of salt. I know there are a lot of people who loved this one, I just felt it was about 150 pages too long, with not much happening, and really heavy descriptions of a lot of irrelevant things. So, unfortunately, I have to give this one 2 stars.