A Novel by Kate Horsley, William Morrow/HarpersCollin, August 2016.
* An e-galley was provided by William Morrow/HarpersCollin and Edelweiss for an honest review.
The American Girl by Kate Horsley
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
THE AMERICAN GIRL by Kate Horsley is a psychological thriller set in France in the present day. American exchange student Quinn Perkins is spending a summer in St. Roch hoping to become fluent in French. At the beginning of the story, she is in the local hospital trying to remember what happened to her. Reports state she was running out of the woods, barefoot and in a torn white dress, trying to flag down a motorist. Instead, she was run down and left her for dead. She has no memory of her life before the accident, and the psychologist gives her a videocam to record whatever thoughts come to her in hopes she will remember what happened.
Molly Swift is a Boston reporter who is just one of many descending into St. Roch to discover what has happened to Quinn and her missing host family, the Blavettes: Emilie, the weird ex-schoolteacher mother; Emilie's daughter, sullen teenager Noemie; and, Emilie's son, Raphael, a handsome, irresistable Sorbonne student. Molly gets close to Quinn by saying she's Quinn's aunt. And since Quinn's family hasn't bothered to visit her in the hospital, Molly hopes she can find the truth about what happened to the American student and the Blavettes before her ruse is discovered.
I've had some difficulty in how to rate this story. I started with 4.5 stars because, on the one hand, the narrative is well-written and definitely amps up the tension. However, the constant back and forth between time frames is confusing. At the beginning of almost every chapter, I had to flick back through the book to remember where I was in the timeline. I felt like I needed a complicated series of arrows, loops and stars on a whiteboard calendar to figure out where I should be in the story. And then there was the too-long length of some chapters. After a while I felt compelled to forget about 75 pages and read the last 50 pages. Once I was assured that the ending was worth pursuing, I went back and read the 75 pages I skipped.
My final deciding factor was the heavy use of cigarette smoking by every character in the book. Not that cigarette smoking, itself, should be a reason for decrease in rating. But I feel that the overuse of this habit in the book was basically filler for the actual story. Lots of space was used up in the narrative by people lighting, inhaling, and fiddling with cigarettes (and some weed). Plus, I couldn't help feeling disgusted by the idea that the characters constantly stunk of cigarettes--their breath, their bodies and their surroundings. The overuse of cigarette smoking did nothing for the story. Instead, I think it hindered the psychological buildup to the twist at the end of the book.
Overall, I think the author has a good writing style with strong characters. She is worth watching, and I will definitely read her future books. But with the timeline all over the place and the filler-ish use of smoking, I can give THE AMERICAN GIRL only 3 stars.
If You Like This, You Might Like: GONE GIRL and SHARP OBJECTS by Gillian Flynn, MORGANS OF NASHVILLE and TEXAS RANGERS series by Mary Burton, FBI THRILLER BOOKS by Catherine Coulter, LUCY KINCAID NOVELS by Allison Brennan, DARKNESS by Karen Robards
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