‘The Huntress’ by Kate Quinn [Book Review]

I think one of my big pet peeves about this novel is that I didn’t feel like there was a lot of mystery to it. For me, for most of the novel I knew who the huntress was and it took away a lot of the suspense that relied on some mystery behind it. I spent a large portion of the book just waiting for characters to figure out stuff that I had already figured out, which can sometimes be a lot of fun but in this case it was more frustrating than anything else.

Some men ogle, some men look. The first makes us bristle, and the second makes us melt, and men are at an utter loss knowing the difference. But we do, and we know it at once.

Overall, I think the writing was really well done. As someone who just dropped reading a novel because the writing was actually hurting my soul, at least this one had some decent writing in it. However, I think Quinn should have held on to the mystery of the Huntress a little bit longer than she did.

I don’t know about other people who have read this novel but I found that there were really only two possible candidates for who the Huntress could be from the very beginning, and it became pretty obvious that one of them was not going to be it. So by around chapter 5 I knew who the Huntress was going to be and then I had to go through the rest of the novel just waiting.

I feel like I’m ranting about this and it’s not really that important because the rest of the novel is good but I just feel like it’s novel needed there to be more mystery around it or at least some kind of twist before the last 10 chapters or maybe less. I came up with a pretty interesting, at least I thought it was interesting, twist ending that would have been super rewarding but it did not pan out that way.

As for the characters, their mediocre at best. Nina seems to be the only one that is given the space to grow throughout the novel whereas the others are more dictated by what they are doing over who they are. I just couldn’t connect in a meaningful way that made all their trials and failures mean anything to me outside of my frustration at them not seeing what was happening. Moreover, their similar enough to each other that at times they seem interchangeable.

However, to end on a positive note, it is a page-turner. I knew that I was going to finish this novel by the end of chapter two. But this means that, while an entertaining and relatively light read, it has very little reread value. I find this happens a lot with suspense style novels as they rely so heavily on shock and the need to find answers. But once you have all the information, know all the twists and turns, there’s not much left in terms of story.

Maybe I’m being too hard on this novel, and if it had just been trash I probably would have shrugged it off and moved on, but the fact that Quinn shows potential makes me very passionate about this novel needing to be better. I wanted to be thrilled by this novel and I wasn’t.

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