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A review by obsidian_blue
The Midnight Feast by Lucy Foley
slow-paced
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
1.0
Child. No.
I can't believe how bad this was. And honestly there was a lot there that would have made for a gripping thriller/horror. Foley I swear needs to go back to basics. Please just write one character. One. Develop them. Do first person point of view. The many characters and the journal entries were just so bad. And the ending. I just went...that's clever and that's all I had. The very very ending I am talking about it. I wonder if she wrote that last line and worked backwards from there.
"The Midnight Feast" starts with a fire. Someone or something started a fire at the newly opened uber rich hot-spot called "The Manor". There's a body that is bashed upon the rocks. Locals feel vindicated (we don't know why) but then the book jumps back to a few days before solstice and then we do a countdown to the day/night of the fire and the so-called "Midnight Feast" and we also get some way way flashbacks to a journal that a mystery guest has found and reads.
The characters we follow are:
THE FOUNDER (Franchesca) she's a long hot mess that you can see coming a mile away.
THE HUSBAND (Owen) who is exhausting in so many ways.
THE MYSTERY GUEST (Bella) a guest at The Manor who is drawn back to this place for mysterious reasons.
THE KITCHEN HELP (Eddie) a local who works in the kitchen and wants to keep it from his parents.
Honestly, I don't want to waste my time with any of the above outside of saying that Foley does not know what to do with any of them really. Bella's mysterious reasons takes so long to unpack you just don't care in the end, and I had a real hard time with the gaping plot holes and the deus ex Machina we get in the end with that whole thing. Eddie is written way younger than he is. Owen and Franchesca at one point had me going, what in the world was even the purpose of this whole thing? Outside of coincidences or something I guess.
The setting of The Manor would have worked better if we actually got more into the lore around the woods surrounding the place. The journal entries didn't do it for me. And speaking of the journal, why would someone need to dig up a journal that would "reveal all" when it's something they already knew? I think the worst scene from me was when one person gave it to another person and was like just keep reading. How about you just tell them?!
The ending as I said was a hard shrug. But the clever line reading and the tie back to some mysterious things and wording came into play. Honestly, maybe she should have just written this a as a short story, that may have worked better.
I can't believe how bad this was. And honestly there was a lot there that would have made for a gripping thriller/horror. Foley I swear needs to go back to basics. Please just write one character. One. Develop them. Do first person point of view. The many characters and the journal entries were just so bad. And the ending. I just went...that's clever and that's all I had. The very very ending I am talking about it. I wonder if she wrote that last line and worked backwards from there.
"The Midnight Feast" starts with a fire. Someone or something started a fire at the newly opened uber rich hot-spot called "The Manor". There's a body that is bashed upon the rocks. Locals feel vindicated (we don't know why) but then the book jumps back to a few days before solstice and then we do a countdown to the day/night of the fire and the so-called "Midnight Feast" and we also get some way way flashbacks to a journal that a mystery guest has found and reads.
The characters we follow are:
THE FOUNDER (Franchesca) she's a long hot mess that you can see coming a mile away.
THE HUSBAND (Owen) who is exhausting in so many ways.
THE MYSTERY GUEST (Bella) a guest at The Manor who is drawn back to this place for mysterious reasons.
THE KITCHEN HELP (Eddie) a local who works in the kitchen and wants to keep it from his parents.
Honestly, I don't want to waste my time with any of the above outside of saying that Foley does not know what to do with any of them really. Bella's mysterious reasons takes so long to unpack you just don't care in the end, and I had a real hard time with the gaping plot holes and the deus ex Machina we get in the end with that whole thing. Eddie is written way younger than he is. Owen and Franchesca at one point had me going, what in the world was even the purpose of this whole thing? Outside of coincidences or something I guess.
The setting of The Manor would have worked better if we actually got more into the lore around the woods surrounding the place. The journal entries didn't do it for me. And speaking of the journal, why would someone need to dig up a journal that would "reveal all" when it's something they already knew? I think the worst scene from me was when one person gave it to another person and was like just keep reading. How about you just tell them?!
The ending as I said was a hard shrug. But the clever line reading and the tie back to some mysterious things and wording came into play. Honestly, maybe she should have just written this a as a short story, that may have worked better.