Just finished this and found it to be pretty atrocious. For some reason this book has almost four stars on GoodReads and just had to come on here and ask… how? Or if I’m really in the minority who found this to be pretty awful? Coming here specifically since I find the discussions to be better and more honest than GoodReads.
I powered through since it was a short read (fewer than 300 pages) and I’m closing in on my reading goal for the year, but that’s 285 pages of my life I’ll never get back. When I read fiction novels, I’m prepared to suspend my disbelief to a certain extent to enjoy the book, but this was just another level.
It did have an intriguing and strong start, so I will give it that, but once we hit the midpoint of the book it was just cliché on cliché on cliché and the plot armor was absolutely out of control. It was eye-rolling at times. I’m not trying to be unnecessarily cruel since I know this was the author’s debut novel, but I’m just confused at how this book has garnered so much hype online from people whose opinions I typically agree with.
What really lost me was the wife asking the President on live TV to not shoot down the plane because her husband is a “man of duty.” Are we serious? Like the President is going to take what some random pilot’s wife has to say into account when making this kind of decision?
What really tanked this into one-star territory for me was the use of the two most overused clichés of all time in books and movies. The first being “bad guy has a gun pointed at the wife, and there’s a GUNSHOT!” (Chapter ends)…(new chapter begins) “But it was the FBI agent’s gun INSTEAD! In the nick of time to take out the bad guy!” Who could have possibly seen that coming, right?
The second cliché that was used earlier in the book being “the house EXPLODED! The pilot’s family is dead! Never mind! The house was actually EMPTY!” I swear, at this point I’m more shocked by thriller novels that have main characters “die” who actually stay dead. This book felt like it could have been written by ChatGPT with how unoriginal every part of it was. The characters were also boiled down to their most uninteresting archetypes, which really made this a slog. The entire family is literally just bare bones “wife, son, husband and baby.”
All this compounded by cringe dialogue, a random and out of place World Series game perspective introduced into the book ~230 pages in, and an ending that practically suggests to us we should empathize with plane-hijacking terrorists. Overall just not worth the read.
I am interested in other opinions though since this was recommended to me so many times. What did we think?
by xTheKingOfClubs
3 Comments
couldn’t agree more. not really my genre, but it got so much hype… so i was looking forward to a fun ride. couldn’t get through it. i can forgive some clunky descriptions and corny exposition in thrillers, but that coupled with appalling dialog is a DNF for me
As I was reading your whole post I was waiting for the baseball game to be mentioned, that bit was hilarious. Honestly the book wasn’t far off being pivoted into satire.
I’m very generous with book ratings, and I love a lot of trash books that are well-rated but not literary, but I also struggled with it. To it’s credit, I thought the book was very fast-paced and people seem to like that, and the premise was interesting and seemed reasonably well-researched. I’m surprised even critics seemed to like it though.
I agree with you though that everything else was off the rails, all thrillers have moments that aren’t realistic but this book was just moment after moment.
Their latest about the plane crashing into the nuke plant is even worse. Read it on Libby and still feel like I paid too much for it.