The Cabin

by Natasha Preston

[Linda]

This review was originally posted on (un)Conventional Bookviews
The Cabin had a lot of potential, but it really didn't work for me. At all. There were times I wanted to put it down, but I also kind of wanted to see how the story would end.


The Cabin had a lot of the tropes that I don't enjoy when it comes to young adult novels. Like MacKenzie falling instantly in love with Blake, and her inner musings trying to justify that. Insta-love is very hard to get especially in the circumstances that were a part of this novel. A group of friends going to a cabin for a weekend in the summer between school and uni, and where one of the guys was more or less hated by everyone else. Fast forward to the next morning, and the hated guy and his girlfriend were found stabbed to death on the kitchen floor. And it was evident to the police that the murderer had to be one of the people who were still inside the cabin.

There were also some pretty glaring continuity mistakes in The Cabin, but I read an ARC, so this may very well have been fixed in the final version. The most important one was that at one point, MacKenzie talks about her 19th birthday being in five months, then, some chapters later, her parents want to ground her, and she says something to them about being almost 18. I also really didn't feel invested in the mystery at all, and I think that was partly because I couldn't stand being in MacKenzie's head! She was quite naïve, and the way she thought the detective on the case would actually share pieces of the investigation with her made me think she was a bit stupid as well.

Written in first person point of view, from MacKenzie's perspective, and in past tense, there just was no getting away from her thoughts and I couldn't connect with her character at all. Her doubts felt shallow to me, and I have to say The Cabin just wasn't for me.