Jamie's Reviews > The Fury

Holy crap, you guys. That was, like, really good.

The Fury isn't exactly what you'd call a fast-paced novel. It meanders back and forth in time and Elliot (the narrator) deviates from the main story over and over. There's a lot of backstory about the various characters and how they met each other, and also about the events that led to the fateful night on the island. But that's kind of what makes it so great, I think? You're getting little snippets of relevant information in each and every chapter, but you have no idea how it all fits together until the end. The action really happens in just a few chapters – and not necessarily consecutive chapters, because Elliot digresses quite a bit between the climatic bits.

Elliot is not exactly the most reliable narrator, either, so the significance of certain events and actions change as he reveals more and more of the truth with each chapter. Often you get one version of events as Elliot is narrating in the first person, and then a more complete version of events later on from another character's point of view. And he certainly withholds some very important details.

Oh, and if it's important to you, the chapters are short. This makes the story seem a bit more fast-paced than it actually is, in my opinion.

The twists at the end were fantastic and I totally did not see any of it coming. I thought I knew who the murderer was at the very beginning, and while it turns out that I was right, it was not at all in the way that I was expecting. I mean, perhaps it wasn't the most plausible sequence of events, but it was tremendously entertaining.

Overall, this was a twisty-turny, suspenseful, riveting novel with a delightfully unreliable narrator. This is the first novel I've read by Alex Michaelides, but if all of his writing is this good, it definitely won't be the last.

4.75 stars, rounded up.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Celadon Books for providing me with an advance copy of this book to review.