The First Mistake

I received an advanced readers copy of The First Mistake from St. Martin's press in exchange for an honest review.  The cover of the book is gorgeous and I had the excitement of receiving a physical ARC in the mail.  Those two factors alone lured me in. Though I must admit that my first Sandie Jone's book The Other Woman was not one I would have considered if it was not a Hello Sunshine book club selection and easily available from my public library.  So even though I loved the book cover I knew that I still needed to be sold on the author's style.

 I couldn't finish the book. I fought with myself on this for a little bit on this fact because I really don't think that it is fair to write a review of a book I did not finish. But it felt like too much work to continue reading for a domestic thriller, which I feel is a genre that should be more of a fun, breezy read.  WARNING: If you want to go through the pain of reading this book, please note that the rest of this review contains spoilers. I DO NOT recommend going through this pain but in the event that this is a must read for you despite what critics say you will want to skip the rest of this review.

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This book addresses  a woman's suspicions regarding her deceased husbands fidelity. I didn't mind the suspicions but I felt like remembering finding a piece of jewelry in her husband's car and wondering if it could have been from the babysitter and the way it was handled from a shallow perspective veered into the direction of being too cliche for my taste. I know that there can be emotional complexities where infidelity is involved and if that was tapped into those dynamics  more than it actually did  this story could have redeemed itself for me.

But the point where I started to feel seriously disengaged was after the main character Alice found a comment on her deceased husband's Facebook page and started to wonder what might be really going on. I vocalized my complaint to my own husband, "How do you know that his Facebook account isn't being hacked?" This idea was never even entertained which is a point that lost me completely. If this is going to be a world rooted in reality than real logical perspectives need to be entertained for me in order to keep reading.

From that point on it seemed that every stereotypical trope possible for a domestic thriller was simply inserted into the plot without any originality.  I felt so emotionally disengaged with the way it was written which made it hard for me to continue reading. I seriously wanted to like this book a lot more than I actually did.   A well written domestic thriller can be a lot of fun but it felt like a chore to continue reading. I need to enjoy myself a lot more to actually finish reading a book.

I am also publishing this review on Goodreads