Book Review: UNTIL THE DAY I DIE by Emily Carpenter

Title: UNTIL THE DAY I DIE

Author: Emily Carpenter
Publisher: Lake Union Publishing
Read: February 2019

Expected publication: 12 March 2019

My Rating: 🌟🌟

Book Description:

If there’s a healthy way to grieve, Erin Gaines hasn’t found it. After her husband’s sudden death, the runaway success of the tech company they built with their best friends has become overwhelming. Her nerves are frayed, she’s disengaged, and her frustrated daughter, Shorie, is pulling away from her. Maybe Erin’s friends and family are right. Maybe a few weeks at a spa resort in the Caribbean islands is just what she needs to hit the reset button…

Shorie is not only worried about her mother’s mental state but also for the future of her parents’ company. Especially when she begins to suspect that not all of Erin’s colleagues can be trusted. It seems someone is spinning an intricate web of deception—the foundation for a conspiracy that is putting everything, and everyone she loves, at risk. And she may be the only one who can stop it.

Now, thousands of miles away in a remote, and oftentimes menacing, tropical jungle, Erin is beginning to have similar fears. Things at the resort aren’t exactly how the brochure described, and unless she’s losing her mind, Erin’s pretty sure she wasn’t sent there to recover—she was sent to disappear.

My musings:

I absolutely loved Carpenter’s novel The Weight of Lies, which was one of my favourite books in 2017, with the “book-within-the-book” format also presenting one of the most original novels I have ever read. So I was overjoyed to receive the author’s latest novel Until the Day I Die, excited to find out what the author would come up with this time. And BTW, isn’t that cover absolutely stunning?

It is with some sadness that I have to say I have mixed feelings about this book. From the outset, I was struggling to fit it into a genre, comparing it in my mind to a hybrid between Nine Perfect Strangers, Lord of the Flies  and a James Bond movie as the plot unfolded. Whilst I found some aspects of the plot thoroughly intriguing and mystifying (like the coding and computer stuff, which seemed like a foreign language to me), other elements seemed to be so farfetched and stereotypical they fit more into the Bond category than the mystery I had signed up for. There are more serious topics, too, like grief, mental health, a coming-of-age story, and the mother-daughter dynamics I so enjoyed in The Weight of Lies. Not to forget the adventure / survival stuff as Erin tries to brave the wilderness, which made for a faster pace in the second half of the book. At times, I was left wondering if some elements were supposed to be dystopian, or maybe I have just been living under a rock (or a book) and have no idea of what is happening in the real world?

It was all there for the taking, and yet it never fully came together for me. Erin, who is portrayed as your typical corporate power-woman, seems meek and helpless for some parts of the story, and feisty in others, which was confusing. She seems to come more into her own as the book progresses, which redeemed her character slightly for me, but I never really bonded with her. I much preferred her daughter Shorie, our second narrator, whose brilliant mind when it comes to all things computer was a force to behold. Whilst the mother-daughter dynamics didn’t have the same emotional impact on me as those in The Weight of Lies, they matured slightly towards the end of the book, so if you feel as disheartened as I did at the start, take heart that things will improve on that front at least!

But where are the gothic elements that I adored in The Weight of Lies and in Every Single Secret? I appreciate that readers’ expectations must be the most frustrating hurdle for an author trying to branch out and try something different. Forgive me – I tried to keep an open mind, I really did! But at times I struggled to believe that this book was written by the same author who made me virtually house-bound whilst reading The Weight of Lies, which would have required an amputation to prise it out of my hands. Whilst Until the Day I Die kept me turning the pages, it never quite got under my skin the way her previous works had. I found the beginning too slow, and just as I thought that things were finally coming together, there was that very far-fetched ending that I just couldn’t wrap my head around.

Summary:

Ok, so here is my take on it: I recommend going into this one with an open mind and zero expectations. If you have read Carpenter’s work before, do a few deep breathing exercises and let all your preconceptions float off into the ether. Or maybe you are a reader who is a lot more flexible than my stubborn little mind, and won’t have any trouble enjoying this anyway. I am the first one to admit that my expectations ultimately were my downfall with this one, and that I may not be the right audience for the type of story that Carpenter is telling here. However, the plot contains enough elements to be entertaining and will undoubtedly be appreciated by many other readers, so please do not be deterred to pick this one up and judge for yourself! For now, let this just be a blip on the radar on my reading journey – I look forward to reading more from this author in future.

Thank you to Netgalley and Lake Union Publishing for the free electronic copy of this novel and for giving me the opportunity to provide an honest review.