Review: The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle

The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This wasn't a book I liked, as much as I just tolerated until its end. It's not bad by any strong measure, but rather it just wasn't creative or interesting enough to warrant my approval. I'm sure there are people out there more familiar with the mystery genre that will eat this book up, and more power to ya, but it was just too average and long for me to really like. It's just another British book in the seemingly endless stacks of British books in the market today (or any day within the last two hundred years).

In a lot of ways, it tries to be unique with its narrative structure. But, if you peel back the superficial layers, you'll find it doesn't have that much going for it. It tries too much to the 'hosts' that the narrator doesn't act out as an actual character, but instead deludes a multiple perspective narration by keeping the voice in the first person. The book literally locks the narrator down in several parts by telling himself that he can't act outside the framework of the host body he is in. Rather than have a character take multiple views, it has multiple characters pretending to be one person. This book could have been completely rewritten as having normal multiple characters third-person narration, and very little would have been lost in the process.

(mild spoilers ahead, but most of it you learn in the first few chapters or in the book's dust jacket)

Maybe my problem with this book was that too much of it was contrived rather than creative. The narrator has eight different lives to solve a mystery. Why eight lives? Because that's how many lives the author created to fit the narrative into. There isn't a single mechanic/reason why it's eight. It could be three or twelve or five thousand and it wouldn't make a difference. It's eight because that was the scope of the author's vision. No more nor less. And having something that inorganic of a plot structure bothered me. Sorry.

Like I said before, this book isn't bad. The dialogue is serviceable, the secondary characters aren't too annoying, and the pacing is practical. It does get exposition heavy by the end. Though, since most books of this type do that, I can forgive it. It just isn't as entertaining nor enlightening as I normally hope for. The host body mechanic is a neat idea in and of itself, but it's just poorly used. Imagine having a cool mech suit that can fight giant monsters and dive deep beneath the ocean, but you only use it to commute to and from work. It's like that, except you just replace the monsters with people who would murder over rich white people problems. Bad isn't the word, it's just shallower than it pretends to be.

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