Book Review - Day Four

Day Four
Author: Sarah Lotz
Series: The Three #2
Genres: Horror, Thriller | Adult
Release 21st May 2015
Source: Review Copy - Hodder & Stoughton
Rating:

Four days into a five day singles cruise on the Gulf of Mexico, the ageing ship Beautiful Dreamer stops dead in the water. With no electricity and no cellular signals, the passengers and crew have no way to call for help. But everyone is certain that rescue teams will come looking for them soon. All they have to do is wait.

That is, until the toilets stop working and the food begins to run out. When the body of a woman is discovered in her cabin the passengers start to panic. There's a murderer on board the Beautiful Dreamer... and maybe something worse.

When it comes to Day Four, I only really heard of it because of The Three, and then when I was given the opportunity to read and review it for LoveReading I was a bit cautious at first. It's been a long time since I last read what is classed as adult, I used to read them more than young adult books when I was a teenager but recently I've only read 1 or 2 over the last 3 years. Anyway I've been looking to get back into adult books lately, and I thought that Day Four would be just the book to help me make the transition (I'm not leaving the young adult community, don't panic haha). When I first read the summary it struck me as a really creepy read, something that would keep me interested and have me hooked. I was looking forward to it, I wont lie, but sadly it wasn't as good as I hoped. Its meant to be a companion to The Three, but you can read it as a standalone. It has mention of some of the characters from the 'first' book but overall I don't think you would be missing much if you read this first.

Talking about characters, the first thing I'm going to mention is that the book is set from 6 (?) POV's and its something I don't think worked. All the different character's have very different personalties and they have different things going on through out the book, so in that respect its good that no two characters are the same, however sometimes it felt like they were all just on top of each other. The chapters didn't always flow nicely into the next one and it was hard to keep tabs on who was actually talking (for me anyway). The 6 character we have are Celine, a fake medium, Celine's assistant Maddie, a dangerous man Gary, Althea who works on the ship, Helen an over 60 (?) year old on the ship for more than the holiday and lastly we have Jesse who is the doctor on board. Even though I thought the book would be more enjoyable if there wasn't so many main characters, I did like how every one had decent amount of back story, it really made up for the fact that some were lacking development.

Right from the start I was intrigued but confused by the book, I wasn't sure what was going on half the time, the only thing I knew for sure was it all centred around Celine and that she was actually getting spirits come through. I was constantly going back and forth with myself, putting my lack of enjoyment down to reading young adult books for so long, but the sad fact is the book just failed to overwhelm me (and apparently I'm not the only one). One of the biggest glaring problems for me was that it seemed like no one remembered they have lifeboats until 3/4's the way in. When the boat first stops and they can't seem to get hold of anyone, I don't expect them to all jump ship, but people were seeing all manner of things, phones weren't working and they were stranded for a few days, it was pretty much hell on board but still no one thought about the life boats and I just thought that was pretty unbelievable.

My other biggest problem with the book was the ending. I was left more confused than ever. Maybe I just missed it somewhere along the way but I didn't think anything had been explained as to what had happened on the ship, but also what happened in the last few chapters. It was a creepy book, and I get that some of the things that were happening couldn't be explained, but seriously.. is that it? Not only was that anticlimactic, but if I had enjoyed the book I would have rated it down a lot just because NOTHING was explained. I refuse to believe that this book was meant to be a 'take from it what you will' type, where explications aren't given because you can sorta pick up the reason along the way because if the author intended the story to go that way I think she failed terribly.

I was pretty disappointed overall, it had the potential to be such a great book if it only cut down the POV giving you the chance to really connect with the characters and what was was happening or it had just been better at giving you answers. I don't I missed anything, or that it was because I finished the book late at night when I was already pretty sleep deprived, I just don't think they were they to start of. It's such a shame this book, it really is.