I saw this book at a local bookstore and was so intrigued by it, but didn’t have the money to get a copy. Thankfully my library had it available on Libby so I read it on my Kindle!… But man, am I happy that I didn’t spend my money on it.
Between Goodreads and StoryGraph, it has a rating (on average) of 3.9-4.1 stars. For me? It was my first one star review of the year.
My Death by Lisa Tuttle is marketed as a mysterious and uncanny book about a widow writing a biography about a mostly unknown painter and writer. She ends up finding all these strange parallels between their lives that horrify her and change the course of her writing and researching process altogether.
It’s been described as chilling, bizarre, strange, uncanny. In my opinion, it was none of those things.
One of my biggest gripes from the get go was how the writing style was very bland. I found it boring and transparent, and it lacked any true substance. When it comes to character driven books, I really look for the story to be well written (or at least, written in a way that fits the story), and in this case, it fell completely flat for me.
I also really disliked the way everything was laid out to you, completely obvious – it’s like she didn’t trust the reader to make any inferences about what was going on. I felt like during her writing process, she was assuming the reader would be stupid and unable to connect the dots in certain ways. There were some places where it felt like this style was necessary, sure, but for the most part that was not the case. Similarly, some parts just made no sense, such as Helen being well into her 90s and being able to walk on an island more easily than her daughter and the narrator?
As for the ending, I don’t understand what happened. The revelation that the narrator was Helen was supposed to be shocking and jarring and instead it left me confused when it reverted back from being Helen to being the separate narrator, speaking to Clarissa. I’ve read multiple reviews and summaries to see if I missed the point, but there’s nothing that has made it click for me why she took that direction in the writing.
Did I miss something? Why do so many people enjoy this book so much? I was rolling my eyes every few pages because I disliked it so much. I almost DNFed it around the 50% mark, but because it’s so widely praised I pushed through.
It wasn’t worth my time in the slightest, but I can’t help but feel like I’m missing out on what I was told would be a mysterious and uncanny read.
by sbucksbarista