BOOK REVIEW: THE TWELVE LIVES OF SAMUEL HAWLEY BY HANNAH TINTI

2.5 stars

Above all else, The Twelve Lies of Samuel Hawley was, for me, a bland book. It started out well enough: I liked the subtlety of the relationship between Loo and Hawley, the writing was clean but not simplistic. But then the more I read it, the more deflated I felt. 

By far my biggest problem with this book is that I just didn't give a single shit about Hawley's chapters. They were incredibly redundant. Hawley gets 12 POV chapters dedicated to him, and each one details how he gets shot in some way or another. And I just didn't care. I could not for the life of me care about Hawley getting shot during some random assignment with some random dude in some random location. The format lost traction very quickly for me because it was more or less the same every time: you know Hawley's gonna get shot at some point, the question is just how that's gonna happen. I was definitely more drawn to Loo's chapters, but then later on I got bored with those as well. Plus I didn't like the direction the plot ended up taking, neither the climactic scenes nor the ending. Sadly this book just went downhill very quickly for me.