Rating: WARTY!
This was a novel about a woman, named Stephanie, a college student who was supposed to travel with her family on a flight. They changed their flight to accommodate her, but she still wriggled out of going, and that plane crashed killing all onboard. Stephanie went into a downward spiral, and ended-up a prostitute in London, spending her meagre earnings on her drinking and drug habits.
One day she's visited by a low-level journalist named Procter, who tells her he believes the plane was bombed and he wants to talk to her about it, but she has him thrown out and beaten-up by the bouncer. After nearly killing a john later, she goes on the run from her pimp and ends up staying with Procter. Later, he's killed, but not before he's helped her straighten herself out. She decides to take up his quest to find justice for the victims of the downed plane.
I'd seen a preview of the movie and decided it looked good, and then had the opportunity to listen to the audiobook of the novel, so I decided to go ahead and give it a try despite it being the first book in a series. Initially, it was okay, but it was a bit plodding. I stayed with it because this would mark the first time I'd been to see the movie of a book right in the middle of reading the book the move was taken from. Usually the one comes before or after the other, so I was curious as to how it would affect my perception of the book.
In the end it didn't make much difference. The movie was okay, but a bit flat and uninspiring, so I went back to the book, which seemed pretty much the same: taking a long time to get anywhere. I decided to give it one more day of listening, but on the drive home that same afternoon, the book went into this endless, tedious, boring exposition that seemed to go on forever. For literally miles, as it happened, because I was driving, and I decided the hell with this and ditched it. I was about halfway through it, but that was too far: it was not getting it done for me.
Stephanie was improbable as a protagonist, because she was never really believable as someone who could come back from the depth she had sunk to, and actually do the job she'd set herself. Experience if fact proved that she couldn't; she was screwing-up time after time. I think even the author himself realized what a poor job he'd done of the book because he also wrote the screenplay and made a whole bunch of changes to it for no obvious reason other than to fix problems with the novel, but he ended-up making it worse! The movie was a lot more insipid than it ought to have been, with these endless maudlin flashbacks to Stephanie's memories of her family which contributed nothing to moving the story forward. On the contrary: they tripped it up frequently.
Plus Ryan Reynolds's wife Blake Lively did not live up to her name. She wasn't lively at all, not even after she'd recovered her health and was actively pursuing her targets. It just didn't work well. There was little humor, and some attempts at humor failed dismally. For example when she ran her vehicle off the road during a training exercise and Boyd, the trainer, was lecturing her. She pulled the parking brake on his transport and set it in reverse so that it ran backwards off the road into some trees. The thing is that both vehicles were four-wheel drive and so wouldn't have been stuck as they purportedly were.
But this is a review of the book, not the movie, and the book took far too long to deliver 'rewards' that were in the end too miserly to make up for the extended overture which preceded them. I can't commend it, and so it becomes another series, and another author, I shall not be revisiting.
