All the Dangerous Things Review
Title - All The Dangerous Things
Author - Stacy Willingham
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spice 🌶 - 0
scare 😱 - 1
plot 📖 - 3
characters 🧍- 3
stars ⭐ - 3.5
The truth is, people love violence—from a distance, that is. Anyone who disagrees is either in denial or hiding something
Messy but dry is how I would best describe All the Dangerous Things. The plot consistently moves forward, but it wasn't until the last quarter of the book that I had those "oh my god what just happened" moments. Willingham set everything up to be knocked down, but reading over 200 pages of set-up work is slow going. The last quarter of the book did start spiraling and didn't stop even through the epilogue. *spoiler* On the other hand,*spoiler*
The "then" chapters were... interesting. Isabelle was around age eight and her sister was around age eight. However, Isabelle is written like she is considerably older than Margaret. Even though they had seemingly absent parents, there is no way Isabelle could have come to the conclusions that she is said to have made throughout the book. There are also inconsistencies with how Mason is written. At some points in the book he is written like a newborn, others as a toddler. You finally find out he is around eighteen months old when he is taken, nothing that Willingham had written would clue you in that he was eighteen months old.
The murderers on the T-shirts are the villains; the uniformed men in back, the heroes. Mason is the victim … and I’m not really sure where that leaves me. The lone survivor, maybe. The one with a story to tell.
Stacey Willingham loves her unreliable protagonists. I have not read her newest book, Only if You're Lucky, however, both All the Dangerous Things and A Flicker in the Dark have highly unreliable FMCs. All the Dangerous Things's Isabelle has "extreme insomnia", which comes with a slew of negative effects. Most of them make the perfect cocktail of an unreliable protagonist. Chloe Davis, from Flicker in the Dark, has an addiction to prescription pills and occasionally mixing said pills with alcohol. This addiction has made Chloe spiral more than once, making her an unreliable protagonist as well. I have read several books with an unreliable protagonist and it's just not for me. Unfortunately, you can rarely tell if the main character is unreliable based on the back of the book. I am often left reading a book about someone confusing themselves and questioning every little thing while slowly driving themselves mad throughout the next 300 pages. This is my warning though - if you are like me and hate unreliable protagonists don't read All the Dangerous Things.
All the Dangerous Things did draw parallels to A Flicker in the Dark in more ways than the protagonist. I won't go into specifics for the sake of spoilers, but it was disappointing that Willingham seemed to be leaning on past writing for the plot of this book. I hope that Only if You're Lucky will draw some new inspiration and showcase a fully new plot from her.
Overall, some of the resolutions were well done and shocked me, others left me feeling like they were an afterthought. There were far too many similarities between this book and her previous one for me to feel like they were fully independent from each out. Her writing about Isabelle as a child and Mason was inconsistent at best. I did enjoy certain aspects of this book, but it did miss the mark in too many areas to get a high rating. I plan to read Only If Your Lucky soon - hopefully, it is a step up.
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