Emily

I wanted to like this but I found it to be convoluted at times. There were a lot of unnecessary historical descriptions and personal anecdotes from the author that just didn't have to be made. The focus was not really on the monster murders as much as it was a strange memoir about a ,”famous author and his family” in Italy and his experiences with the corrupt justice system there. Every time things got interesting the focus would suddenly shift and I found myself skimming through to find out where the story picked up pace again. Preston also kept weirdly name-dropping and propping himself up as a “bestselling author” throughout. Overall, the language is dated, the tone is distracting and it ended up being three books jammed into one. I feel like I still don't know enough about this case and will have to learn about it elsewhere.

Alright, so this has been on my to-read list for quite a while and I finally got to it! I'm really disappointed. Unfortunately this was not interesting at all and I feel quite opposed to the five-star reviews and the very high rating it has here on Goodreads. Definitely feels like I one of those moments where I think that I read something different than everyone else.

I don't know how this became so unbelievably boring. It started out very tight, focused and engaging because you wanted to know what happened and then it just shut that down entirely. As soon as anything interesting happens in this book, we flip to a different time, another character etc and climb some stairs. Actually have people going up and down stairs.

I also want to complain because the copy I read has a quote on it saying how it real the world building is basically and I did not find it real at all. I found it flat as hell and the characters felt like they were not talking naturally, I don't know if it's because they live underground and their style of speech has changed but didn't feel like a deliberate choice but just bad dialogue a lot of the time. I didn't really find any of the characters engaging and I had a very hard picturing them in my mind...and I wanted to and I tried! Everyone became kind of little cardboard cutouts acting out the story for me.

I don't usually write reviews but I had wanted to read this for such a long time and then it was such a damn struggle for me to get to the end of this book I really had to. Anyways, this isn't a one star review because I liked the concept of the book and I really wanted to explore that stuff further, there were parts where I was kind of skimming the b plot to get back to the a plot of discovery with the character of Juliette, but then I just became disappointed again because her main purpose was just to kind of keep doing the same thing over and over again of groping around in the dark in various ways. Now I'm thinking on it. I feel like none of the characters grew or changed very much in a believable way, except for the convenience of the story.

Also there was some discussion about why the silo was here and how it was constructed to make lives separate and difficult. I hope that the incredible amount of stairs were a part of that and I was just waiting for like an explanation as to why nobody had come up with a better solution than hundreds and hundreds of stairs all the damn time! No one has solved that in any way? I got really “tired” of hearing how “tired” all the characters were and the heavy-handed classism discourse. Definitely felt like I wanted more exploration and less time spent on build up to very boring events, like so much slow build up for nothing.

There's a lot actually I could just keep going and I don't know, Maybe skim this one if you want to know what the hype is all about but I honestly feel like nothing happened in this book and I don't think that was a style choice. I'm aware that The story continues in other novels, but honestly I'm not going to be reading them.