i am not sure why everyone is sobbing in the reviews about this book as it seemed really mediocre to me. i have picked this book up half a dozen times over the year and have never been able to finish it. i decided an audiobook would be easier to get through vs forcing myself to read the actual words.
as other reviewers have said, it was difficult to connect with the characters. i honestly didn't care about any of them, it felt like toshikazu kawaguchi over explained every single possible thing he could, only to contradict all of that detail by ending the passage by saying that the character couldn't put their feelings into words even though i just read 3 paragraphs about said feelings they claim they cannot put into words??
as the book has been translated i am sure some of my dissatisfaction comes from translation issues, or at least i hope it does.
i have 2 issues with this book:
why is every story about a woman giving up her identity?
why did a man write this?
every single story is about a woman giving up who she is, for a man. the first story is about a successful career woman, waiting on her now ex boyfriend who dumped her to focus on his career overseas.
the second one, a woman decides she will be a nurse for her husband who is suffering from some form of alzheimer's. while this one was kind of sad, i didn't really care all that much for it.
the third and final story was infuriating. once again, a woman decides to give up who she is for someone else. in this situation, she knows she will die if she continues on with her pregnancy. she even finds out she dies! and yet, she still has the baby, knowing her daughter will grow up without a mother. this is not selfless behaviour, this is deranged.
author grady green is having the best day of his life - until his wife, abby mysteriously vanishes and he finds her car abandoned by a cliff side.
a year has passed since abby went missing and there are no leads on her disappearance. grady, an author with a terrible case of writers block, mixed in with insomnia and a drinking problem, is approached by his agent kitty to live in a cabin on an island out in scotland as a way to get his life, and career back on track.
this novel starts off rather slow and i will be honest that during the first half of the audiobook i did often find myself having to go back and listen to parts of chapters again due to losing interest in the plot. by the second half the book does pick up, and the audiobook has some additional sound effects that do really help you get immersed in the book.
alice feeney does a great job at keeping you on your toes, and wondering what’s going to happen next. the book being set in a tiny scottish island was an excellent choice & learning how the small community remained as tight knit as they were was at times mind boggling, but also kept me wanting to know more about each of the characters and what lead them to this small island.
with that said, i was let down by the book as i felt the build up to the “big reveal” and the twists to follow were hard to believe, as they seemed extremely outlandish.
a huge thank you to NetGalley & MacMillan audio for the arc!
Spoilers below!
i have so many questions and thoughts on this plot oh my god.
i will talk about the positives first:
as i said above, the audiobook having additional sound effects for things like the walkie talkies really did help me pay attention. it made the narration much more interesting and managed to hold my attention, i think if i had read the book i wouldn’t have finished it.
the two abby reveal was a twist i did not see coming. when abby (wife) recounts the bad man trying to harm her, but she manages to escape it did confuse me as we had learned earlier that abby had been harmed by the man, repeatedly, during piano lessons. i honestly thought feeney had accidentally left a giant, gaping plot hole. finding out kitty’s real name was abby, and that she (kitty) was the abby being victimized during piano lessons really threw me off! i thought this plot point was executed really well, and was impressed at how feeney pulled it off.
....and now for the not so positives:
originally i had guessed that abby had voluntarily gone missing, choosing to leave grady because he was abusive in one way or another. when we learn that abby did not leave grady in a carefully thought out way, but instead left due to grady trying to kill her that night i was shocked. let’s be clear, i was not shocked grady tried to kill her - i figured from what we had learned about grady, he most likely was abusive, my shock was that abby had not originally planned to leave him that night! or really even at all?
i have so many issues about the night abby disappeared. for starters, what the hell do you mean a woman who went to great lengths to hide her fertility treatments from her husband, left a pregnancy test laying about the house!? on top of that - abby decided she would use a sperm donor to get pregnant and give grady a family that wouldn’t abandon him?! this makes absolutely no sense to me and i lost my mind when the audiobook reached this reveal. grady had vocalized he didn’t want children, abby knew this. instead of divorcing him she thought surprising him with a baby that wasn’t biologically his was going to fix this marriage? good god, woman.
on top of feeney wanting us to believe abby truly thought the secret pregnancy thing was a good idea - she also wants us to believe that the police didn’t really suspect grady? i could be mistaken here as most of the narration around the investigation was at the very start of the book but the police didn’t seem to care abby was missing? grady is an unreliable narrator, we know this as he discloses he has insomnia and drinks too much. however, he didn’t really speak at length about the investigation other than the police dismissing the concerns about abby’s large withdrawals from the bank account. sure, the police probably figured she went missing voluntarily but you’re telling me they didn’t even bother to check where grady’s cellphone was that night? we learn that grady called abby back that night while pretending to be a woman laying down on the road so he could attack his wife and try and kill her…he’s on the phone with her and the police don’t notice the two cellphones are 20 feet away from one another at the exact time she goes missing? also, whenever i am on a call on my cell, and the other phone has been within ~20 feet of mine…you get this very loud, nails on a chalkboard type of feedback on both phones! you want me to believe that, that didn’t happen?!?!?
on top of me not being able to believe the cellphones not having crazy feedback being that close together on a call, i also couldn’t comprehend how grady recognized abby, as aubrey, only to later decide they weren’t the same person. i know he was drugged up from that tea, his drinking & insomnia…but what the hell do you mean he suddenly decided the woman who is the spitting image of his missing wife, who he has spent an entire day or two chasing around because he believes so strongly aubrey, is abby, is not his wife at all!…only for it to be revealed aubrey, is abby…just in brown contact lenses. this is giving the same energy as when sailor moon transforms and suddenly the bad guys don’t recognize her as the 14 year old school girl she is.
Overall, I really enjoyed The Villa. I found it very captivating and listened to the audiobook in one day because I simply couldn’t get enough of all the characters. I loved how the book switched from Mari’s POV in the past, to present day with Emily.Â
(spoilers below)
There is one plot point that I can’t fully wrap my head around: Emily believing Chess.Â
Correct me if I am mistaken, but in the first part of the book when the girls first arrived in Italy, Emily was telling Chess about how she had watched the Lilith Rising movie at a sleepover in elementary school during a classmates birthday party. Chess claimed she was never invited to said party, and then mere moments later reminded Emily about how she (Emily) climbed into her (Chess’) sleeping bag because the film scared Emily. Emily didn’t push Chess on the lie she very clearly caught her in.Â
This brief interaction between the girls stayed with me the entire time, why would Chess lie about something so pointless? It shaped how I viewed Chess - as a liar.Â
When Emily (finally) clues in that Chess had slept with her husband Matt, she is so willing to believe that Chess only slept with that loser once, and that Chess stayed in regular contact with him so that he would eventually leave Emily.Â
Chess convinces Emily that she was sick because of Matt, and that the only reason she had gotten ill on the trip was because she had called Matt and her body was triggered by him. While I totally believe that, that is something that happens…I do not believe it happened to Emily. Emily only called Matt because Chess convinced her to! Chess also prepared some weird drink for Emily which honestly I think was poisoned! I think Emily was right in her original guess that Matt had been poisoning her. I think Chess was sleeping with Matt the entire time, and knew what poison concoction he had been giving Emily, so she spiked the drink as a way to con Emily into believing that “the body knows” bullshit she was peddling on about.Â
While I was listening to the book, I couldn't help but think that Chess originally brought Emily out to Italy for ulterior motives. Part of me thinks Chess invited Emily to join her, so she could confess to Emily about the on-going affair with Matt, or if we are feeling especially sinister...Chess was going to kill Emily in Italy as a way to finally be with Matt, guilt free.
I think Chess changed her mind last minute when she snooped through Emily's laptop and found the draft of The Villa. Chess realized it was a gold mine, and knew she could manipulate Emily.
While Emily clearly has a blindspot for Chess, she at least has some brains and was able to find Mari's secret hiding spots for her journal entries.
Mari's POV was very interesting, I felt for Mari as she was so young when Pierce ran away with her and Lara. I didn't have too many thoughts/questions about any part of the book that covered Mari's POV. If anything, I was the most immersed in the book during the past storyline.
At the end, when we find out Mari did not kill Pierce and that it was Jonnie, I was disappointed that we did not learn what caused the argument between the two men. Honestly, I can't stop thinking about how much Chess pissed me off as a character to even say anything more about the other storyline.
