Book Review: The 7 1/2 Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton

"That's a book REPORT, not a book REVIEW."

Remember hearing that in sixth grade?

It's very easy to do reviews in the following format:

• I really liked this book

• This happened

• And then this happened

• And then this happened

• QED, I really liked this book

I'm totally guilty of that - sometimes it escapes the writer's notice that they are offering plot points instead of insights.

I very easily could have fallen into this same trap with this review. But there's a problem - I don't feel comfortable giving away any plot points at all for a story where it could be a spoiler to even mention the first WORD. So instead of talking about what happens in the book, I'm going to try to deliver some insights. Here's what comes to mind:

• I can tell you that, among other things, this book is a whodunit mystery. There are also a ton of characters in this book. I feel like this is related. I mean, when you think about it, in order for there to be any mystery there has to be a menagerie of characters - not every mystery can be Sleuth. I feel like in this book the characters that you absolutely need to be able to distinguish stand out just enough, but there are many other characters who are maybe not absolutely necessary but definitely important who sort of blend into each other. It doesn't help that so many of them have names that start with the letter D - Dance, Davies, Derby, etc. I'm not sure why that decision was made (what you got against the letter D, maaaaaannnn?!?!), but I do think the characterization in this book could have been cleaned up a bit.

• Who are you? Let me ask that again so you don't have the wrong em-PHAS-is on the wrong sil-AB-el (to borrow a funny Mike Myers bit from a horrible Gweneth Paltrow movie) - who are YOU? In fact, let's take it a step further - what is it that makes you YOU? If you could talk to yourself from ten, fifteen, twenty years ago, how much of you would you recognize in...you? And did you always have the things that make you YOU in you, or can your identity change drastically? This book really delves into identity, first as a surface-level (but fun!) plot device, but eventually dives deeper into how exactly people change and (hopefully) evolve. Seeing this theme evolve from the start to the end of the book was refreshing.

• The action in this book takes place (as it were) in a dilapidated country estate in the first half of the twentieth century. The problem is, I don't know exactly where - the date has nothing to do with the plot itself, but when I try to picture the events in my mind's eye it makes a lot of difference if it takes place in the 20s or the 50s. It's entirely possible someone at the very beginning of the book said the date, but it's a very long and intense story so I definitely don't remember that detail - I wish that there was someone reading the paper saying something like "Now Churchill thinks he can be PM? HAH!" or something. Might not seem like a big ticket item to the writer, but as a reader it threw me off a bit.

• Thanks to the excellent podcasts from the Faraci brothers at Cinema Sangha (highly recommended for people like me who enjoy 40-somethings yelling at each other about the meanings of Star Wars cartoons), I watched a Christian Fundamentalist movie called Black Easter. The acting was terrible, the message was terrible, and the lunkheaded attempts to cover up the anti-Muslim themes that were part of the original movie were terrible. But what the movie had going for it was that not only was it a time travel movie, it was a very well thought out time travel movie. Time travel stories at their best are like clockwork - things happen in the background the first time you see them, or characters are unexpectedly delayed or absent, but later on in the story these turn out to be vital. There are time alterations at work in this story, and they are masterfully thought out - the further you get the more the story truly sings. In the afterword the author talked about how he kept everything straight with the help of Excel and a wall of Post-It notes - it truly paid off! He also talked about how during the drafting process he hated getting notes from the publisher - one change on one page could result in myriad changes in multiple pages! It's a tough task, but it works out in the end!

• There's a sense that all the stories in the world have already been written. Plots of new books/movies/etc. usually end up echoing plots of stories that have come before. Even cliches can work, though - it depends on how deep the characterization is, how intense the storytelling, how surprising (yet understandable) the plot evolution is. As you could probably guess from the above, there's a twist in this book (I should say, there are MANY twists, but I'm talking about the main twist here). It's apparently for a few hundred pages that a twist is coming, and when it comes it may not be the first thing that popped into your head but it's probably in your top three. And it pulls it off...admirably. It doesn't knock it out of the park, but it doesn't drag the story down or make you feel cheated either. It seems a bit like the nadir of the story, but the story was at a very high level for most of the book, and recovers quickly.

So QED, I liked this book. Eight out of ten hot dogs.