I am back with another book review, Unbury Carol by Josh Malerman. Thanks so much to Penguin Random House for sending me an ARC of this book for an honest review, as always, all opinions are my own.
The story follows Carol, a woman who falls into comas which are sometimes mistaken for death. The only people who know about her condition are her husband, Dwight, and the once-famous outlaw James Moxie. After she falls into another coma, Dwight claims she has died in an effort to secure her fortune as his own. When Moxie catches wind of Carol's death, he fears that she is not actually dead and returns after leaving her many years before.
I can't really say too much else about the synopsis because that was as far as I was able to get in the novel before putting it down. I think there are three main reasons why I put this book down, one and a half of them are not the book's fault so while I wasn't able to finish this one, that doesn't mean it won't become a new fave for you!
Firstly, the timing wasn't great for me to be picking up something I was a bit iffy on. It sounded good from the synopsis but sometimes you can't really know until you start reading it. Anyways, I had a lot going on personally and just didn't have the time or energy to devote to this book.
The other reason I wasn't a huge fan of this book was mainly that I had received it under the impression that it was a (modern-day) thriller. In actuality, it is a Western thriller-type novel. I suppose the "outlaw" thing could have clued me into that so I won't fault the book fully for this being one of the reasons it just didn't work for me. BUT, nowhere in the synopsis or really in the book does a time-frame/date come up. I'm imagining it takes place back in the time of the "Wild West" where the best they can do to check if someone is dead or not is to hold a mirror in front of their mouth to see if it fogs with breath.
Generally speaking, I also felt like the book jumped around a bit too much for my taste. There were many different perspectives or snippets of other characters that were a part of the story - either in a major way or in a minor role - and they helped piece together the whole story. This is often a hit-or-miss scenario for me and in this case, I don't think I was in the right mood to try and follow what was happening.
Overall, the almost half of the book that I did manage to get through was fairly well-written and interesting if this is the kind of book you are looking for. I know it will appeal to a lot of other people, it just wasn't for me.