Book Review: The Vacation by T.M. Logan

I just could not find my way into this one. I was so excited at a new T. M. Logan. I loved Lies and 29 Seconds – with both books I fell into the story from the opening pages and the tales held me from beginning to end. With this one, I just never found my way in…

I found the characters irritating and petty and utterly unsympathetic. I may be full up on long-time friends who are all hiding horrible secrets from one another LOL… It seems like every other book uses this as the backdrop for a mystery these days – or at least every other book I seem to be picking up. It’s possible that I’m just burned out on this as a premise, but I found the back-and-forth revelations to be uninteresting and uninspired. I honestly just didn’t care what Sean was hiding or what Terrible Things Kate had done to each of her friends in the past. The drama felt overblown and contrived and it was completely unbelievable to me that these women would have stayed friends given everything that has happened to them and that they’ve done to one another over the years… The kids felt like stereotypes and their plot lines didn’t told me either. It felt like two books cobbled together into one when the focus shifted to their stories/points of view.

All in all this one just didn’t work for me and frankly I never even made it to the big reveal at the end. I couldn’t gin up enough interest in the characters to even skim chapters to get there… This one just didn’t do it for me. A lot of people have enjoyed it though, so as I said I may just be done with “old friends with secrets” as a storytelling concept. If you haven’t been down this path multiple times already, this one may work better for you than it did for me… I still consider myself a Logan fan and will definitely check out his next book, based on the success I had with the first two. But this third one just didn’t have that “grab me and hold me” factor of the other two…

Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for my obligation-free review copy.