Time flies when you’re on a vacation! 🙂 July was lovely but now it definitely seems like summer is showing signs of turning into early autumn. I finished a couple of books during the summer vacation and Nine Perfect Strangers was one of them.
Just don’t do anything you’re not comfortable with. That’s all I can say.”
This was the first book from Liane Moriarty I’ve read and I had quite high expectations because I absolutely loved HBO’s Big Little Lies series that’s based on Moriarty’s work.
Nine Perfect Strangers tells the story of what happens at a health and wellness resort when treatments are taken to a new level. A group of strangers enroll to an expensive retreat at Tranquillum House for ten days and they are given the promise of being transformed totally after the retreat. The story then introduces the mysterious host of the retreat and her vision for changing people in her own peculiar way. I’m trying not to spoil much here since this is still a relatively new book. 🙂
So anyways, we then focus on getting to know the strangers at the resort. There are different kinds of people and they have a wide spectrum of problems that they’ve come to solve with some healthy life habit changes. Then of course things start to get weird and the atmosphere changes from healthy to ominous.
I have mixed feelings about this book. On the other hand there were a couple of interesting twists towards the end that matched my expectations of a psychological suspense novel. Then again most of the book is about the various characters and getting to know their current and past problems. Some of the characters are quite well explored but most of the characters started to feel a bit annoying and I felt that the book could have been shorter. I think I gave 3 stars to Nine Perfect Strangers in Goodreads, which seemed appropriate for a book that was good enough to finish but not good enough to convince me to immediately seek other books from the same author.
Perhaps my expectations were too different for this book (compared to what it actually was) or perhaps this wasn’t the best work from author Liane Moriarty and I should’ve started exploring her work from some other book entirely.
I’m half-way through the Reading Challenge, a bit behind schedule but there is still time. 🙂 Nine Perfect Strangers fills the prompt of:
26. A book that you see someone you don’t know reading
I happened to see someone reading this book one day when I was taking the metro to a doctor’s appointment. It’s surprisingly rare these days to see someone reading a paper book so it took some time to fill this part of the challenge.
