The Tenth Girl

by Sara Faring

[empressbrooke]

There are a lot of really negative reviews here based on That Twist. No spoilers here, I will speak very generically. I came across this based on a recommendation from a horror blog, so I decided to give it a go and was actually very eager to find out what That Twist was. Through the whole book I was coming up with dozens of theories about what That Twist was going to be, and that was quite entertaining - maybe even moreso than reading the book without awareness that something WTF was coming. I did not end up guessing correctly, although a few of my theories were of the same "flavor." And quite frankly, I thought That Twist was just fine! Up until it happened, I was definitely filing this as a "4 star" rating in my head. However, I did think that some editing to really tighten up what came after That Twist was revealed would have greatly improved things. There was a particularly over-the-top villainous villain who infodumped everything in a Villain's Monologue that just draaaaaagged it down. This issue was probably my #1 issue and my star rating probably could have bumped up to 4 if this had been fixed. It also would have been better served by laying more of a foundation for That Twist - more specifically, the mechanism that facilitates it, to be perfectly vague but hopefully makes sense if you've read this. Without this foundation, the world-building got mushy and had some internally inconsistent moments, and the characters' plans got very hard to follow. Overall, I did enjoy my time with this and I would read more by the author.