Even If We Break by Marieke Nijkamp
My rating: 1 of 5 stars
I don’t even know what to say. This book was a huge disappointment for me.
I knew going in, the reviews were not the greatest. Regardless of the super interesting synopsis, it seemed a lot of readers were not enjoying it.
Frequently, I find myself in the minority opinion on polarizing books, however, so I still wanted to give it a shot.
I love slightly cheesy, teen slashers, particularly with weekend getaways or gaming elements. This book sounded like it would be a great fit for my tastes.
We follow five friends, who I believe are in high school, who head off to a cabin in the Arizona mountains for a weekend getaway playing a RPG they created.
There are costumes, a murder mystery to solve and things go south fairly quickly. Before you know it, we have a real life murder mystery on our hands.
I would surmise that incorporating a high fantasy RPG into a narrative story would be a complicated task, and I think I’m right, because I found it confusing AF.
I was still sort of intrigued, but then it went off the rails.
The big baddie was super obvious, so no real suspense there and then the drama to reach the conclusion was ridiculous. I’m sorry, but it was.
There was also a lot of hard-hitting contemporary topics sprinkled throughout that seemed oddly out of place. It made the overall intent of this novel confusing.
There were some diverse characters in here, which I love to see, but in a way, it felt overplayed; like it was just an effort to get them in there for that sake alone.
I don’t know, it didn’t come off as genuine? Perhaps because they were portrayed so one dimensionally.
This is just my opinion, of course, and I would love to see OwnVoices reviews on this story.
If you are unaware, this novel features trans-rep, nonbinary-rep and disability-rep. I also would really like to see reviews from individuals who actually participate in RPG; I would love to hear people’s opinions on how that was represented here.
Without belaboring the point, I didn’t like this. If you pick it up and enjoy it, or even love it, I am so happy you had that experience with it.
Sadly, it just wasn’t the right fit for me. On to the next!
Original:
1. A Weekend Getaway.
2. A Game.
3. Deadly Secrets.
I will
never
skip a book with these buzzwords.
Sign me up!