When I turn parts of my brain off, I really like the book. I am a simple man, and I enjoyed the "eat the rich" message, and the dunking on horrible guys. That was fun. The kills were sometimes a little too brutal for me, a bit hard to stomach, but I guess that was the intended reaction.
But it felt like I really had to stop thinking too much about some things to really enjoy it. I wish there was more about Dez character. I liked that she did not switch sides in the end to try to escape with Marie, and I liked that she still wants to do something with fashion, but not couture for the hyper rich. But I still wonder why she was sympathizing so much with the hyper violent people. I get that she is on their side because they are from the same social class, but then I wondered why she wasnt shocked by the extreme violence and by how everything was planned. If everyone has just been shot or poisoned..
I also didnt really like the mention of the father in the end. It seemed like it might be important, like she was a lost daughter of Luke or something, but then it didnt matter anyway.
The overall theme reminded me of some horror movies - murderous shit goes down at remote island. It was all carried out really well though and I loved that there’s action almost right away and there wasn’t a huge build-up like in some books. The island and its residents seemed eerie from the start and if it wasn’t for the, in my opinion, plot summary that gave way too much away, you could’ve thought that the Ruskins were going to be the ones doing the killing. However, turns out they’ve been doing bad shit all their lives regardless I feel like it was really easy to sympathize with Valerie and the other servants and I often felt like “you know what, hell yeah”, but I will admit some deaths were pretty gruesome and no one deserves to die like that. Of course, that’s just an outside perspective and I could be feeling differently about it if I was in Valerie’s position. I like the twist that pretty much all the female servants are related to/are Ruskins and it goes well with their deluded eugenics breeding program. I’m not surprised at all that they’re all just objectively bad people with a supremacist worldview. Bit of an odd coincidence that Dez is (probably?) a discarded Ruskin too and I would’ve liked to know who exactly her father was. I’m usually not a massive fan of open endings, but I think this one left us with enough closure. I do wonder though; what is Dez gonna do now? I think fashion design will now always be tied to massive trauma and there’s no way of knowing what else she’d like to do.
