Book Review: Nine Perfect Strangers by Liane Moriarty

Christmas 2018, I was gifted this book, twice. Practically everyone I knew was gifted it for Christmas. Liane Moriarty was beloved for Big Little Lies and her other seven books, so this was a much anticipated release. However, in true book worm fashion, this book remained on my TBR (to be read) pile for years.

In anticipation of the upcoming Nine Perfect Strangers tv series, I jumped into a buddy read with two of my favourite bookstagrammers @jaime.reads and @peachesandcreampages. The TV series is out now, so the question is, should you read the book before you watch it?

The answer - no. Here's why.

Rating

2/5 stars

Synopsis (Plot)

Nine people who are struggling to find happiness in their own lives sign up to a 10 day spa retreat at Tranquillum House. This spa engages in newfound and bizarre techniques to help each of the guests transform. They seem to be perfectly matched, all with a similar experiences that they can relate to and help each other cope with. But then things start to get weird.

The novel switches between perspectives of the nine characters, as well as the three people running the health resort. It's easy to follow the different perspectives and it's fun to always know what is going on.

The Ending

Wacky. The characters were stereotypical and the plot predictable, so the ending wasn't amazing nor mind blowing. Just wacky. When the main conflict began, it dragged out to the point that I skim read it. Then after countless pages of dialogue and the characters finding themselves and 'transforming', the book began to heat up again. There was another climax. And then it wrapped up neatly and almost unrealistically.

The characters should have been traumatised from their experiences. Enraged. Disturbed. But there was no evidence of that. Or maybe I'm just being cynical? After all I'm no psychologist. But I am human.

Final Thoughts

Wait for the TV series. With a cast including Nicole Kidman and Melissa McCarthy, it will be a stellar tv show. The premise behind the book was interesting, and you could tell that Liane Moriarty had done her research on the topic.

Why 2 stars? Because of the writing. Which I'm sad to admit, because I loved Big Little Lies and The Husband's Secret. The characters were extremely stereotypical, the dialogue was disjointed to read (especially when reading Jessica's and Zoe's dialogue, the two young girls, whose dialogue included the word 'like' way too often, which disrupted the flow of the dialogue) and there was too much telling rather than showing. While Moriarty had some clever ideas and the premise was interesting, the telling rather than showing dampened it.

Why is telling rather than showing a problem? Telling the reader what the character is feeling or the consequences of a situation is an offence to the reader's intelligence. Readers are more than capable of drawing their own conclusions. For example, in one section the text, a character's inner monologue was being juxtaposed by the names of yoga positions. At this point, the reader is able to assume that the yoga positions are symbolic and are related to the character's thought processes or growth. This is showing as it allows the reader to draw their own conclusions. However, at the end of the sequence, the yoga poses finished on 'snake sliding through the grass'. Then Moriarty wrote 'Heather was the snake sliding through the grass.'

Didn't need to be told!

If you liked this book, read these...

1. Big Littles Lies by Liane Moriarty

2. The Husband's Secret by Liane Moriarty