Save Us
Thank you to NetGalley and Berkley Publishing Group for the digital review copy in advance. This book, now translated into English, hits shelves today, November 4th.
As I did with my reviews for Save Me and Save You, let me preface this by saying I have not watched the television series on Amazon Prime and went into these completely blind. It’s my understanding that the first season of the show roughly follows the first book. This is the final book in the trilogy.
In this book we pick up with Ruby and company still in sixth form at Maxton Hall. Ruby has just been suspended from school after some shocking (and doctored) photographs of her were shared with the administration. What will happen to her dreams of Oxford, now? James, her love interest, admits to taking the photos before he really knew her, but swears he did not share them. Sabotage is at work and the drama only increases from here.
I flew through the first half of this book and at first really appreciated the extra points of view. Book 1 had only Ruby’s and James’s. Book 2 added each of their sister’s. When I first saw that Graham’s POV would be added in the preview for book 3, I was excited, but the execution of adding Graham and Alistair as voices fell flat for me. I never got to stay in one POV long enough to feel fully invested. There were too many storylines for me to care about all of them equally and I found myself frustrated or bored during some of them. I think this actually would work very well for screen adaptation, especially with the late-teen/early-adult setting. Television shows often have several storylines going and make them compelling. In a fairly short novel, I just didn’t get that. Because of the ambitious amount of story being told here, I also felt like the conflicts were resolved a bit tidily.
With that being said, I still found the trilogy overall to be extremely bingeable and am looking forward to watching the series now that I have a complete picture of the characters from start to finish in my mind!
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Intimate scenes were fairly vague and low-detail.
