From the bestselling author of Pretty Little Liars, a thriller about writer Eliza Fontaine, whose debut novel seems a little too real when she's found at the bottom of a hotel pool and she launches an investigation to find a possible attacker.
...a brilliant narrative about a confused young woman struggling to separate fact from fiction in her life ... Perfect for millennial readers and highly recommended for fans of eventually justified 'paranoid woman' characters who descend in a direct line from Charlotte Brontë to Ruth Ware.
Her swarm of fans who have come of age with Pretty Little Liars — and Shepard’s many other YA novels — will not be dissuaded from reading her new book, The Elizas, a thriller aimed at an adult audience, no matter what scorn I heap upon it. But, though the effort be futile, heap I must ... Shepard’s story line is simultaneously so ornate and empty that it dissolves soon after reading. Eccentric but flat characters populate the novel’s pages, and false alarms pop up in every chapter with humdrum predictability ... I’ve tried but failed to think of a single positive thing to say about The Elizas, but no matter. Word is the novel has already been optioned for a film adaptation.
Turns out there’s a whisper-thin line between topping another author and just plain toppling over, and Sara Shepard’s The Elizas stumbles so dramatically that from page two on it’s closer to gut busting than hair raising ... In order to accommodate Shepard’s big narrative hooks—the brain-tumor subplot especially seems destined for bad-book cult immortality—the story is forced to go ludicrous, with outlandish coincidences, characters being told obvious lies that they believe just ’cause, and other narrative pieces that have to be pounded together ... The plotting is the literary equivalent of a comb-over for plot holes: just as thin, and just as effective as hiding what it’s supposed to cover.
