Kirkus Review: The Guest List by Lucy Foley

An extraordinary dark, suspenseful mystery where everyone has something to hide. Taking place on a remote island off the Irish coast that just so happens to be the location of a pervious massacre, Lucy Foley’s The Guest List chronicles the events leading up to and during the high-profile wedding of reality TV star, Will Slater, and online magazine editor, Julia Keegan

During the reception, the lights go out unexpectedly and a terrifying scream is heard from a waiter at the reception who has apparently just seen a lot of blood. Many secrets are revealed through flashbacks of events from the previous day, most notably from Olivia, who is the bride’s sister and Maid of Honor, the bride, Johnno, who is the Best Man and, the groom. It is through these flashbacks that the finding of a body is revealed.
Meanwhile, before the wedding, Julia has received an anonymous warning to not marry Will, stating that he is not who he says he is. This causes Julia to be on edge and start to question everything she knows to be true about her soon to be husband 
Through the perspectives of many characters, several dark secrets are revealed, from Olivia’s troubled past leading her to drop out of university, to learning about the dark past of Will and all his old boarding school classmates, all of whom attend the wedding. 
Not only is the identity of the dead body revealed, but many characters soon learn that they are connected in more ways than they had previously thought. In the end, everyone’s secrets collide in unexpected ways, creating many twists and turns along the way.
Foley does a tremendous job tying all these interesting, complex, characters together, slowly revealing secrets that are truly shocking. This mystery is addicting and will keep you guessing till the very end.

Comments

  1. BeccaFebruary 11, 2023 at 3:06 PM

    This sounds rather good. My question is how is the pacing and the flashbacks shown? Often times the flash backs for me break up the flow of the story or seem not needed. Also would your personal review of this look or come off as different compared to this?

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Week 11 Prompt

I think that the rise of audiobooks and eBooks, has done a lot to change appeal factors.  I would like to first focus on eBooks, I don’t think not having a physical copy of a book changes much about knowledge of the genre. Some factors I do think can be changed are that an eBook doesn’t have the thickness of a large book, which can often make a book look more intimidating. I do not think changing the font changes pacing or tone all that much. However, if a font is distracting in the way it looks, it might change the pace at which I read a book. Changing the line spacing might make a paragraph look less intimidating. I feel like using a big font might result in feeling like you read a lot faster and might change your reading speed. When it comes to audiobooks on the other hand, I think they have many ways of changing appeal factors. I think this is particularly true when it comes to who is reading the audiobook. For me, I think narrator choice can greatly affect your enjoyment of a ...
Read more

Week 15 Prompt

The three ways I would choose to market my library’s fiction collection are social media, displays, and book clubs. Social Media  For this tool, I would focus on two of the most popular social media platforms right now, Instagram and Tiktok for Instagram, some possible posts include, a staff pick of the week, a monthly theme with five or so books for the theme each month (Theme could be a genre, topic, etc.) and a monthly author spotlight) For Tiktok I’d do an as seen on Booktok video each month, genre spotlight videos, and author spotlight videos. Displays I would use this tool by creating one or two new fiction displays each moth. Some of these would correspond with various history/awareness months (Think pride, black history, etc). Or holiday themes, such as romance for February/Valentine’s Day. Book Clubs Many libraries have book clubs, so this isn’t a fresh idea, but it’s proven to attract people to fiction books. One idea I have for a book theme is New Releases, where each mo...
Read more

Week 7 Prompt

I would say that over the last two years I have allowed my reading choices to be greatly influenced by Reese Witherspoon’s celebrity book club. At first, I thought it was because I’ve probably seen Legally Blonde dozens of times, and follow Reese’s life frequently on socials, but now I know it goes much deeper than that. For starters, I first heard of many of these books Reese Witherspoon selected for her book club because her production company was adapting them for the screen, after googling some of these titles I learned of the book club. I soon noticed that the majority of these books have incredibly well-crafted strong female leads, and when you add this to the fact that Reese frequently speaks out on feminist topics, I started to feel her section and opinions on these books were incredibly trust worthy. Furthermore, the CEO of Reese’s production company, Hello Sunshine, says the following about the heart behind the book club , the heart of a book club hearkens back to groups of w...
Read more