The Family Tree by Steph Mullin
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

This book had so much promise: An eye-catching cover, a brilliant premise, a blurb that piqued my interest.

But ultimately, it fell woefully short of expectations. Woefully.

The writing was so amateur it was laughable. While the authors try to be descriptive, these passages are mostly “tell” with very little “show.” The amount of detail they go into on completely extraneous information—the way a toll booth worker counts change, for instance—is exasperatingly dull. The characters speak in long monologues, with dialogue tags at the very end, and because they all pretty much sound the same and there’s no action or context to clue you in, you have no idea who’s talking. The main character continually repeats the premise of the book (“I’m adopted, my parents are terrible for keeping it from me, I’m related to a serial killer, poor me, etc.”) to every single person she comes in contact with, often before bursting into tears. I found myself skipping through long swaths of text because it was either mind-numbingly boring or it had already been mentioned five times previously. I could probably have edited about 75% of the text without affecting the story whatsoever.

And that ending. Talk about a cop-out, not to mention a major letdown. Don’t even get me started on the epilogue.

That said, I did find the chapters from the victims’ perspectives to be interesting, if somewhat shallow. The way the timelines finally came together at the end was probably the most well-executed part of the whole story.

But sadly, that was not enough to redeem the book in my mind. Overall highly disappointing, and any subsequent books by these authors will be a hard pass for me.

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