Since half or more of your book ends up described by the inevitable UR (Unreliable Narrator)......you've got to find a way to make it riveting and entertaining for a reader to plow their way through the swamp of the UR's lies.
Author Walker forgot that simple rule. Yes, the plot's studded with explosive twists, but she forces a reader to endure a slow march across the UR's lengthy internal ramblings. Really slow.
Slow enough to make you wonder if the payoff twists make it worth your while to wade through the verbiage. Bluntly.....this book will do a better job of lulling you to sleep at night instead of keeping you up to see what happens next.
Teenage sisters Cass and Emma drop out of sight for three years after escaping their toxic family. This domestic mountain of misery includes an equally loathsome stepfather and stepson......and worst of all, their sociopath mother, who's the center of all monstrous evil in this story.
Only one of the girls, Cass, returns........and brings with her a grotesque, fantastic story of how the girls were first aided but then imprisoned by a weird married couple on an island off the coast of Maine. On this hellish little rock, a pregnant Emma gave birth, only to have the sinister husband and wife seize the baby for their very own.
Of course there's way, way more than meets the eye here.......and that's as much we could talk about without entering spoiler territory.
All the twists are decently disturbing, but "Emma In The Night" just takes too damn long to unravel them all. So sorry, the best we can do for this one: 2 stars (**). If you can't resist this kind of book, then have at it, by all means........but don't say we didn't warn you how much it'll test your patience.........
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