Thank you, Atria Books, for the gifted copy of The Other Side of Night. {partner}

Genre: Mystery
Trope: Science Fiction
Format: 📖
Pub Date: 10.11.2022
Star Rating: ☆☆.5

Summary:

“The Other Side of Night begins with a man named David Asha writing about his biggest regret: his sudden separation from his son, Elliot. In his grief, David tells a story.

Next, we step into the life of Harriet Kealty, a police officer trying to clear her name after a lapse of judgment. She discovers a curious inscription in a secondhand book—a plea: Help me, he’s trying to kill me. Who wrote this note? Who is “he”?

This note leads Harri to David Asha, who was last seen stepping off a cliff. Police suspect he couldn’t cope after his wife’s sudden death. Still, why would this man jump and leave behind his young son? Quickly, Harri’s attention zeroes in on a person she knows all too well.

Ben Elmys: once the love of her life. A surrogate father to Elliot Asha and trusted friend to the Ashas.

Ben may also be a murderer.”

Review:

“We’re vulnerable creatures. We carry our hurt with us, and each wound forms new scar tissue that makes it harder for the person beneath.”

Let me start by saying that The Other Side of Night was not for me, but I have a few friends who loved it, and I know there will be others, so please take my review with a grain of salt. In some ways, this book reminded me of the Blake Crouch book Recursion, which I didn’t like either. Maybe I’m just not clever enough for these types of books, but I frankly have no idea what the heck I read. I just know I didn’t like it and was ready for the book to be over.

Part one of The Other Side of Night started strong, but then part two went off the deep end for me. I knew it was genre-bending, but I had no idea how genre-bending it would end up being. The author took me down this philosophical wormhole that made my head hurt and left me feeling even more disconnected than I had before. There were also several different narrators, and I wasn’t 100% sure who was narrating at some points.

😵‍💫 Genre-bending
🧐 Philosophical
🙃 Complicated, hard-to-follow plot
❓ Alternating narrators with some unreliability

I recommend reading The Other Side of Night if you enjoy stories that take you way out of your comfort zone and never quite bring you back down.

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BOOK INFO
Format: 304 pages, hardback
Published: October 2022
ISBN 1982196181 (ISBN13: 9781982196189)