![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Mobi and The Interview
Oct. 9th, 2022 10:38 amI met Chris Ewan at an event recently and bought his latest book, The Interview.
Caveat: Thrillers are not generally my thing.
Plot: Kate goes for an interview for her dream job in a fancy London office block. The interview takes place in a 'privacy meeting room', a glass cube within a busy open-plan office. Not long after it starts, the interviewer pops out for a minute and doesn't come back. Kate soon discovers she's locked in and, on opening all the blinds around the cube, that everyone else has gone home...
I liked the protagonist and the first-person narrative was engaging and relatable. I understand the concept is to present a very ordinary situation that most people can relate to, and then have it go very badly wrong. But I think the level of mundanity in the initial setup of the interview went on a bit too long. The secondary viewpoint narrative of the interviewer did allow for the introduction for intrigue and foreboding in an effective way, so that was handled well.
But I did find the middle section a bit wearing - there was a lot of time spent on Kate trying multiple different ways of escaping or attracting attention from outside, without the plot moving forwards or really the reader finding out any more information. But I imagine fans of this kind of genre would find the tension-building effective and emotive.
That said, it really did pick up in the latter stages - there were multiple twists I did not see coming that made the arc of several characters much more interesting. I would have liked perhaps a bit more aftermath, but I think that's also a usual feature of this kind of book.
So, overall, it dipped quite badly in the middle for me, but the ending very much redeemed it.
I have also played a new game this week - Mobi, which is basically Bananagrams but with numerical equations. I wasn't going to play, since time-based games are not my thing and neither is mental arithmetic - but I decided to join in and found I was a lot better at it than I expected and it was also a lot more fun.
Caveat: Thrillers are not generally my thing.
Plot: Kate goes for an interview for her dream job in a fancy London office block. The interview takes place in a 'privacy meeting room', a glass cube within a busy open-plan office. Not long after it starts, the interviewer pops out for a minute and doesn't come back. Kate soon discovers she's locked in and, on opening all the blinds around the cube, that everyone else has gone home...
I liked the protagonist and the first-person narrative was engaging and relatable. I understand the concept is to present a very ordinary situation that most people can relate to, and then have it go very badly wrong. But I think the level of mundanity in the initial setup of the interview went on a bit too long. The secondary viewpoint narrative of the interviewer did allow for the introduction for intrigue and foreboding in an effective way, so that was handled well.
But I did find the middle section a bit wearing - there was a lot of time spent on Kate trying multiple different ways of escaping or attracting attention from outside, without the plot moving forwards or really the reader finding out any more information. But I imagine fans of this kind of genre would find the tension-building effective and emotive.
That said, it really did pick up in the latter stages - there were multiple twists I did not see coming that made the arc of several characters much more interesting. I would have liked perhaps a bit more aftermath, but I think that's also a usual feature of this kind of book.
So, overall, it dipped quite badly in the middle for me, but the ending very much redeemed it.
I have also played a new game this week - Mobi, which is basically Bananagrams but with numerical equations. I wasn't going to play, since time-based games are not my thing and neither is mental arithmetic - but I decided to join in and found I was a lot better at it than I expected and it was also a lot more fun.
