Hi friends, happy Monday, I hope you’re all well! Today I’m going to be posting my review of Riley Sager’s novel Final Girls.

Final Girls by: Riley Sager: It’s been ten years since the massacre at Pine Cottage where Quincy became the sole survivor, deeming her a “Final Girl” from the media; a group of girls who have met the same fate. Years later she still can’t remember the details of that night, but when one of the other “Final Girls” ends up dead, secrets start to unravel and the truth begins to reveal itself. The premise for this novel was really good and intriguing but the execution of it wasn’t done as well. The pacing was off; the reader had a hard time getting into the novel to start because it was a really slow build up. By the time we got to the end it felt very rushed, nor did the payoff feel like it was worth it. We are still, by the last few chapters, very confused as to how the characters are related and who did what. We’re left so far in the dark that once everything was revealed, in a monologue that was heavy on the exposition, that it didn’t feel like it fit. There was no build up to how it could have been this character. The author did do a good job of creating multiple red herrings that had the reader slightly intrigued, but the ending just didn’t live up to where we thought the plot was going. The ending felt like it was added more for shock value than anything else. Then we had the characters who the reader didn’t really care for. To start, Jeff, Quincy’s boyfriend was flat, boring and didn’t actually feel like he supported her; it felt more like he was conditioning her to believe she was ok and moved passed her trauma, when she clearly wasn’t. Then there’s Coop who was even more of a bland character, he would swoop in at the drop of a hat to make sure Quincy was ok; he was given some background but really his world seemed to revolve around Quincy and that got dull quickly. Sam was something else, the reader didn’t really know what to make of her; she was made as vague as possible for the plot’s benefit but she wasn’t the most exciting to read about. Even Quincy as a main character was kinda boring, she didn’t do anything to really move the story along. Instead, her moves felt predictable, whereas she was supposed to be seen as a strong, brave character, the ‘hero’ if you will, of a massacre and it didn’t really come across as that. This was a good attempt at turning the stereotypical ‘final girl’ in a horror movie on its head, but it sorta ended up falling flat with pacing issues and characters that just weren’t engaging enough.