Monday 25 July 2016

Review: With Malice by Eileen Cook

Publication Date: 9th June 2016
Publisher: Hot Key Books
Source: Review copy

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Blurb:

Wish you weren't here…

When Jill wakes up in a hospital bed with her leg in a cast, the last six weeks of her life are a complete blank. All she has been told is that she was involved in a fatal accident while on a school trip in Italy and had to be jetted home to receive intensive care. Care that involves a lawyer. And a press team. Because maybe the accident…. wasn't just an accident.

With no memory of what happened or what she did, can Jill prove her innocence? And can she really be sure that she isn't the one to blame?


 Big thank you to Hot Key Books for sending me a copy of this book in exchange for a full and honest review. 

First up, I just want to say how beautiful the cover of this novel is. I'd seen photos of this book around Instagram before I began reading it and it's just such a gorgeous cover. I'm a sucker for beautiful typography on a book cover! 


Going into this book, I really did not know what to expect. I hadn't read any reviews of the novel or heard anyone talk about it so it was refreshing to go into the novel without any other opinions. 



The novel centers around Jill, an eighteen year old girl who has awoken in a hospital to bed to realise three things, firstly that her memory of the last two months is missing, secondly her best friend died in an accident she was involved in and thirdly she is the number one suspect in the death of her friend. 

The idea behind the novel seemed promising at first but as I read on, the pacing seemed to slow and there were little to none surprises or plot twists. The plot had great potential to grip me and take me along in the story but when it came down to it, I had guessed the ending since the very beginning and each plot development was expected / obvious to me.  I was hoping for this novel to keep me on the edge of my seat and to thrill me but sadly it just never fully reached that point. 

The characters in the novel were another area I didn't really enjoy. The protagonist Jill was sort of a bland and boring character with very little stand-out qualities about her. She was sort of meek and mild and I never really felt myself connect with her. 
An area I feel the author never fully developed was the relationships between the characters. Jill and her family's relationship could have been explored a lot more or even mentioned more in the novel as I felt that that would have added to the atmosphere of the novel more. I would have also loved to have seen Anna's character developed more as although she was by far the most interesting character in the novel, she read as two dimensional and her friendship with Jill did not read as genuine. 


Overall the novel disappointed me. I was looking for a summer suspense novel, that would give me the same feeling as We Were Liars, but sadly this novel just was not for me. 




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