Review: The Birthday Reunion by Claire Seeber

EbooknerdReviews

May 30

3.5 stars, really

When three friends receive an invitation from a former friend to celebrate her 40th birthday with an all-expenses paid island vacation, they decide to accept- old feud be damned. They could really use a vacation and maybe a cathartic clearing of the air after 20 years. But when they get to the island, their friend doesn't know anything about any party. Or why they are there. And then more people from their past show up. Stranded for at least the long weekend as a storm rolls in, can the group work out what's going on before someone gets seriously hurt- or worse?

The book alternates between timelines: the past when the big blow-up between the four friends occurred and the present on the island.

The premise of this book grabbed me right from the start: an isolated island, in which a puppet master has initiated a mysterious reunion between enemies with a strange, strained past…..it has all the makings of a great mystery. And for the most part, the book did deliver for me, I was drawn in as weird things happened in the present and as the suspense and tension in the past started to ratchet up.

And there was a bit of a nice twist at the end which was unexpected which left me smiling.

But where I think things didn't really go into 4- and 5-star territory for me was that while things did happen and we did get some explanations, we didn't get really full pictures of things. It was almost like passive explanations or insinuations that we then had to put together. The "big betrayal" that split the friend group kind of fell flat, it was really mentioned almost in passing. And the big mystery of the whole book felt disjointed and with a lot of moving parts, since several people were doing several things all at once.

But I wouldn't call the book bad or anything. I enjoyed reading it. It may just need a polish to get the plot and action a little tighter and emphasize some parts of the story more than others.
That's my two cents.

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