Saturday, January 4, 2020

Book Review: Twisted Course

I'm still frustrated with this. I have literally no intro.

Twisted Course - Aly Martinez
This is the alternate version of the other two books, Changing Course and Stolen Course, both of which you should read BEFORE you read this one. Which I did not do. I would have done that had I known this piece of information and I maybe wouldn't have disliked this one so much. The only reason I read this is it was a freebie for signing up for Aly Martinez's newsletter and it's a short novella and those are fun.

In this book we have Caleb who immediately finds himself at the scene of the accident that kills Sarah. His fiance, Manda, was a passenger who is seemingly (physically) OK. Of course the death of her best friend sends her spiraling into depression and their relationship really struggles. Caleb doesn't know how to help her and he finds Manda turning to unhealthy coping mechanisms, so he suggests group therapy for grief. That ends up being the nail in the coffin for them which you're almost grateful for because you could have seen that coming from the first few pages.

I didn't realize this was a "what happens if Sarah died instead of Manda" book so when I get to the end and I'm left with a cliffhanger?! To say I was pissed is an under statement. Now I understand I'm supposed to be able to pick up Stolen Course and kind of go from there but to be honest with you, I'm really torn on whether I want to even do that. I'm generally not a fan of alternative story lines and steer clear of them, I'm not even a fan of a story told in another character's point of view, so had I known that's what this was, I wouldn't have read it. Unlike most novellas where it's a complete story arc in less pages, this isn't that at all. Not only do we have the ending cliffhanger, we have the weird "what actually happened during this accident" just left out there with no more discussion, and there is all of this weird angst between characters for which there is no explanation and I'm assuming you would have that if you had read Changing Course but of course I don't know.

Overall it was really promising until that ending and the realization of what this was. I don't know if I want to read the duet now because honestly this would just confuse me at this point. I'm giving this 2 stars because the story was OK, it's the ending that ruined it for me.

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