Review: The Villa

The Villa by Rachel Hawkins
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Not a fan. I was on the fence about this one before I even started it, but I liked The Wife Upstairs so much that I decided to give it a try. I shouldn't have.
Told in two different storylines, this book is about writer Emily, who finds herself stalled in both her career and her personal life, and about Mari, a teenager who has attached herself to a struggling musician. Both of these women find themselves at a Villa in Italy in an attempt to turn their lives around. Mari arrives at the villa in the early seventies with her married lover and fragile stepsister, in order to spend the summer with a has-been musician who definitely lives the stereotypical rocker life-style of the time. Emily goes there with her best friend Chess, who has a successful lifestyle and self-help brand. What the reader and Emily know, that Mari doesn't, is that Mari's stay at the villa will result in a scandalous violent crime that will led to the successful, if strange, careers of both her and her sister. The book seems to unfold to the climax of what happened at the end of Mari's stay and Emily's discovery of exactly what events took place on that tragic evening.
It's a promising premise, but it wasn't well-executed. It seemed that a lot of time was devoted to the seventies story-line, but none of these characters were well-developed enough to inspire sympathy. They lacked depth and felt wooden, even when the author was trying to convey how emotional and dramatic they were. It felt trite, especially when they all devolved into the old, trite, and tired "rockstar" tropes. To me, it made them even more unlikable. The whole Frankenstein/Mary Shelley vibe felt inorganic, wooden and forced.
And then Emily's storyline in the present suffered. More emphasis should have been placed on this. But as a result Emily felt naive and frustratingly blind to her situation. I wanted to yell at her to trust no one. And she seemed to know she should trust no one...but her actions did not go along with that. At all.
The setting seemed strange, as well. With the subject matter, the reader might be expecting a dark, gloomy, creepy crumbling castle, or something along those lines. But a bright sunny villa during a hot Italian summer is where this story takes place. Perhaps the author was trying to juxtapose the setting with the actions and make it feel unexpected and jarring in an ironic and clever way. But it just came across as jarring--in a bad way,
But what really got me was the ending. I won't give away any spoilers, but Mari's last "letter" just made me feel like, "What was the point of all of this?!" And then the decisions that Emily makes at the very end are just plain ridiculous. I'm not sure if these actions are supposed to make her seem more like an "independent" strong women who was taking control of her life and her future, but they actually had the exact opposite result. Why would she go that?! I just got mad.
I would absolutely not recommend this book. When I finished I was just mad that I'd wasted time reading it.

View all my reviews