The book that made me realize Reese Witherspoon and I have different tastes in literature.

Genre: thriller
⭐️Stars from Goodreads: 3.76
⭐️Stars from me: 2
Available on Amazon

Every now and then I get sad for the trees that were cut to print one bad book or another. What a waste. Thankfully, no trees suffered for my copy, as it was an audio version. When I finished this book I was so frustrated, I felt a need to constantly rant about it, and even more frustrated because I had nowhere to rant about it, my blog didn’t exist then.

That’s why I was so relieved when I found these two reviews on the Internet, first and second. Finally somebody was saying the words that had been clogging up my throat. There are spoilers in those reviews, but some books are better spoiled than read.

Something in the Water is about a couple who don’t know how to behave in the most obvious situations, but probably they were made idiots because the author needed a reason to move ahead with a catchy but highly unbelievable plot about mafia, money, death and Bora Bora holidays.

The audiobook took me through hours of tedious housework, so the book gets two stars from me, not one. You have to be thankful for company when cleaning cat toilets. I was able to zone out and focus on garbage while missing chunks of irrelevant internal monologues. By the end of the book there was a blister in the part of my brain that processes tag questions: ‘He won’t do this, will he?’, ‘They would already be here, wouldn’t they?’, ‘He can’t do this, can he?’ Marvellous grammatical exercise. Shitty internal monologue…isn’t it? 😉

Perhaps, one of the biggest sins of this book is not even the fact that Catherine Steadman doesn’t distinguish Turkish from Arabic, or calls a city with two million people a village. The worst sin is that she doesn’t care if her readers are enjoying her book. There’s a difference between good, well-timed suspense that makes a book even better, and random, unrelated pieces of text jammed into the middle of an action with the sole purpose of moving the finale further away. The second one seems to be exactly what Catherine Steadman was doing.

Reese Witherspoon chose Something in the Water for her book club. I don’t know what kind of housework Reese Witherspoon had to do to come up with this decision. One thing is certain, Reese Witherspoon and I have very different chores and very different tastes in literature.