A Reading Update!

           So, I just finished the 7 ½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle. Overall, it was a very good book, especially at the end. Looking back on it now, this book has most of the elements I look for in novel. Unconventional setting, heavy character growth (over multiple characters) and a confusing chronology. This book switches between times and places and the same day is lived over and over again. It has some good twists and you are confused about a lot for things for most of the book, but when everything starts catching up to each other it makes it that much more satisfying. The book follows Aiden Bishop, although we don’t find out his real name until a good way into the book. He has woken up in this estate, Blackheath, that is owned by the wealthy Hardcastle family, who on the anniversary of their youngest son’s murder welcomes everyone who was there then back again for a party where, at the end of the night, Evelyn Hardcastle commits suicide. Aiden wakes up in a different party-goers body every day, to relive the same day over and over again. In order to escape this strange fate he must find out the murderer of Evelyn Hardcastle.

            I’ve come to care about for most of the characters, even the ones that are particularly loathsome and was left with a feeling of hope from this book. The books leaves you with a lot of “what happens next?” questions, the mystery is solved but the characters’ lives beyond Blackheath is something we don’t get to see, and we are only given Aiden’s hopes of what his life will become. I don’t normally read a lot of mystery or at least I don’t mean to. But when a book does turn out to be one, I always love the puzzle aspect of trying to figure it out before the character. I can confidently say I did not even come close to figuring out the answer in this book. There was so much to keep track of, that I couldn’t keep up and sometimes they would reveal something the character did after the fact, only when it became relevant so that you couldn’t anticipate what was happening.

            It was a very fast-paced book, in that the main character had a deadline of 8 days. It kept me interested, especially in the last hundred pages when we started to figure out the real truth. And it had a very satisfying end. As the book leaves you with a lot of questions, I was wondering of the author, Stuart Turton, had plans for a sequel. Looking online it does not seem like he plans to write another one, he has plans for a separate book to come out sometime this year, but one completely unrelated to his first. It does seem to be in the same vein as The 7 ½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle in that it looks to be a murder mystery with some sort of supernatural/paranormal aspect. This was Turton’s debut novel, and I would recommend it to anyone who, like me, kind of enjoy being left in the dark for most of a book.