Goodnight Beautiful by Aimee Molloy (#113 in 2020)
Aimee Molloy had me with her first novel, The Perfect Mother. It was clever and twisted and original.
Goodnight Beautiful is broken up into three parts:
Part 1: Interesting... let's see where this goes... OOOOH!
Part 2: 😑😑
Part 3: 😑😡
The Perfect Mother might have been awesome, but Goodnight Beautiful, however, is simply just a ripoff of Stephen King's 1987 novel, Misery. Needless to say, you were 33 years too late, Aimee Molloy.
Molloy's novel isn't pitched as a "retelling" at all, but King's Misery is referred to a number of times through the course of the plot and Molloy's plot, itself, is uncannily similar to King's. I'm assuming she intended to pay homage, but it seriously just came off as blatant copying.
As I said with other authors who ripped their storylines from previous works, I'm not totally pushed away from Aimee Molloy, but she'll have to win me back. Perhaps her next novel will be a product of her own ideas... let’s hope. If the book stopped after part 1, I would have been happier. My star rating for this book is solely based on the fact that I did enjoy the first part: ⭐️⭐️
My suggestion: Save yourself the time and just read Misery. No one can do it like the King (see what I did there? 😉)
As always, thank you to @harperbooks for giving me an advanced copy and the opportunity to review.
Comments