Hello everyone!
I am back with another book review, Your Life Is Mine by Nathan Ripley. Thanks so much to Simon and Schuster for sending me a copy of this book for an honest review as part of the Thriller Chronicles promotion, as always, all opinions are my own.
The book follows Blanche, the now-grown daughter of Chuck Varner - the man who walked into a California shopping mall with his eight-year-old daughter and opened fire in 1996. Blanche has spent most of her life trying to distance herself from her family - including her mother who was just as enthralled in Chuck's cultish practices as he was. At the night of one of her documentary premieres, a journalist shows up, threatening to expose Blanche's hidden past, sending her spiralling back to her deadly roots and unearthing secrets only the daughter of a killer could keep.
As with a number of the books I read these days, I only really ever have a periphery idea of what the book is about. If I've read the author before, sometimes that helps, or if I know the genre, but for the most part, I go in blind. And that is exactly what I did with this book. I'm not sure I would not have picked it up if I knew what it was about, I think I would have just been better prepared - though, that's on me.
Despite some of the more plot-based problems I had with this book, I really loved Ripley's writing style. He has such a way of making the reader feel like they are a part of the story, explaining and giving such detail. There are a number of scenes that I won't soon forget and that I felt were almost visceral.
Aside from feeling like the plot was a little all over the place, I think my biggest problem was that I don't really understand why things happened and why the book ended the way that it did. I'm not sure if it's just me having read a lot of thrillers already and being somewhat familiar with the genre, but I just felt like there wasn't a lot new happening, other than the cult angle.
Overall, I left this book feeling like I had finished a well-written book, in the sense of the craft, but not necessarily a well-written book in the sense of plotting and characters.