by Frieda McFadden

A light page turner by Freida McFadden that ends in a surprising place, though getting there is a bit tedious.

There is no doubt that McFadden delivers a page turner here. But I found myself wishing I didn’t have to turn those pages. The plot is a bit weak. The surprise turnaround at the end is a surprise, but it is also a facepalm.

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The blizzard setting. Werner’s terrifying isolation after the crash. Your uncertainty about the motives of the people who rescue her and the increasing fear that she will die before she gets real help creates a creepiness that almost heads into horror territory. I like horror. And I would have been impressed if she went there. (She did not.)

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But it also gets a bit tedious. Werner is trapped. She is helpless. She vacillates between believing her captor/saviors and wanting to kill them. She wants to save her baby. She has lots of time to think about what went wrong, what she wants for her baby, and how she ended up here. But she does nothing. Nothing. And so will you, dear reader, have plenty of time to contemplate her choices (and yours) about how she (and you) got here. Because nothing else really happens for a big part of the story.

This listlessness is not merely the fault of the plot, I don’t think. Stephen King’s Misery was a similar story. But, in that, things happened, even though nothing happened. It was terrifying. You do not see the end coming. You will never forget it. That is not the case with McFadden’s The Crash. (You will forget.)

I found myself thinking that the characters in The Crash don’t really have clear motives, though this ultimately becomes more about the way the story is told — to build that page-turning suspense — than a failure to create characters. The characters, by the end, do feel complete. But they don’t really feel realistic or worthy of so much attention.

Ultimately, this isn’t one of McFadden’s best. And she isn’t really a literary genius — though she is prolific. But if you want to turn some pages, stay up into the night getting to the end, and get a surprise at the end, this delivers on all those fronts. And it is available on Kindle Unlimited so you can read it for free if you subscribe to that.

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I don’t mind a book that is more like a guilty pleasure TV show than a literary feat. I like to chill at home with a book that hooks me until all the pages are turned. I don’t do book shaming. If you want Cheetos one day, smut another, and Finnegan’s Wake on Saturdays, I’m that reader, too. And McFadden can deliver the guilty pleasure, empty calories product consistently, even if I roll my eyes sometimes at the contortions she goes through to get to the end with suspense. This one is more like Fritos than Cheetos, though. I felt a little ill by the end and didn’t want any more.

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