Mud Vein

by Tarryn Fisher

[Jack]

Unmarked spoilers may be present.

This book still has me speechless and I finished it Sunday morning.

Everyone and their mother has read this book, and loved it. I have
mixed feelings about it While it's worthy of a 4 or even 5 star, I'm
gonna have to rate it a 3.5 for the ending.

It felt really anti-climactic and confusing! I had no idea who the
kidnapper was, wondering if it was Nick; Senna's ex-lover, or even her
mother! But never would I have expected it to be
the therapist! It didn't really make sense, I didn't get the connection, expect that I guess the therapist wanted to play God.
Unless the truth was that she was in love with Isaac Which I think it was...but pretty lame truth if you ask me.

I'm actually really disappointed about the end. There's no happy ending to be found here. Senna is just as hard and closed off as before. She changed in some ways because she admitted the truth to herself, but she mostly stayed the same.

I found Senna to be very cynical, and a pessimist, always looking at the bad things in life. Which is understandable because she's had so much happen to her, bad thing after bad thing. The one thing that made her happy, Isaac, the man who saved her, she couldn't have. She couldn't seem to make emotional connections with anyone, not Isaac, or her former lover Nick.

This was an emotional roller coaster, and I as much as I sympathized with Senna, I found myself having trouble connecting to her. She was so negative, stubborn and unwilling to change. The biggest issue is that she seemed like a robot, like she had given up on life long ago, long before the incident in the woods which brought Isaac and Senna together. And we never get a clear explanation as to why, besides that her mother left when she was younger, and now she has little contact with her father. We're given no reason as to why she's so stoic, and dead.

Even at the end of the book, after she's had her revelation of truth, she's just as dead.

Isaac was an amazing character, I wish we had gotten a deeper look into his character and past. I'd totally read a spin off book all about him, what he's thinking during and after captivity. Especially regarding his feelings towards Senna. Especially since she seems so incapable of loving someone, or admitting that she loves someone.

I loved the kidnapping scenes, the mystery of it all, especially the carousel room! And the way we get flashbacks into Senna's live were really well done. The unraveling of the mystery was done exquisitely. It was the end reveal and lack of growth with Senna that really hurt the book for me, why I gave it a lower rating then I wanted too.

Not to mention it took me forever to figure out what MV meant.

I think this is one of the only books that will forever confuse me on what I actually want the rating to be.