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Rating: 1 out of 5

Genre: Horror, Mystery / Thriller, YA

People who should read this: Unless you want your whole world flipped on its head… then maybe no one. 

Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope.

I feel betrayed. 

For the love of all things books, never… and I mean never… do this to your readers. You will forever lose them as a loyal audience.

To not give too much away, I’ll just say that my hatred for The Tenth Girl involves the ending. I’ll call it the twist. A twist that feels like a bunch of lies wrapped up in a rotting bow. There’s a reason writers are supposed to include foreshadowing. It’s so that readers have the wherewithal to accept the story that’s being dished out in the end. Not providing even the simplest idea that things are not as they seem, is akin to tossing your readers out in the middle of the ocean without a life raft. It’s unfair, and again, a betrayal. 

I came on the ride and now I want my reading time back. 

Don’t get me wrong, I love a good twist. I love a twist I can’t see coming. Take The Village, still one of my favorite movies. When the audience learns that the village is not what it seems, there were enough questions for the audience to be prepared. They could keep their feet planted while the story flipped. This is done by providing three levels of foreshadowing. Easy stuff for every viewer/reader to catch onto the idea that they need to watch out, a middle ground that’s harder to guess but the average viewer/reader will pick up on the clues, and then the stuff that only the best of the best will see. The Tenth Girl had none of that. Looking back, I see maybe two little lines that could possible, in a roundabout way that still makes no sense, point to the fact that the twist is what it will be. In truth, nothing helps. 

I’m not buying what Faring is selling. 

Have I gone on this tangent long enough??? Are you ready for more complaining? I just wanted to make sure you had a clear idea of my wrath before I moved on. 

The twist is not the only reason that I’ve handed out one of my rare 1 star ratings (though 2020 has been trying to test that). Faring’s writing style was also a bit much. I know a lot of people are saying that they loved it and I did at times too, but other times it really clogged the flow. It took too long to explain something in the heat of the moment. Those action scenes were tiresome. I wanted to skip whole paragraphs just to see what would happen next. There’s a time and a place and at the beginning I loved the in-depth descriptions because they helped to set a tone. Otherwise, keep it snappy friends. And with those descriptions came a few confusing moments when I was trying to figure out what was happening. 

The Tenth Girl could have been a lot shorter.

And with all of this, all the complaining, all the crying, all the wishing that I read a real book instead of my kindle so that I could throw it across the room, I’m still considering reading her second book. Someone send help. Why am I doing this to myself when I can’t stand what happened in The Tenth Girl? I guess…. because her writing was really great at the start and if you can recreate the start of the story and leave out the second half, it really wasn’t too bad. I might have even given the book 2.5 stars if she didn’t fool me in the end. 

Happy Reading

Love Kait

Reading Challenge: 151/175