Book Review: Bird Box

Book: Bird Box by Josh Malerman

Source: Library

Rating: 2 1/2 stars

Review:

Reading this was like watching one of those old scary movies. It's full of suspense and fear but there were times in the story where I wished something more would happen besides reading various conversations between the characters.

Bird Box is about a strange phenomenon that has suddenly taken place on Earth. The story centers around main character Malorie as she copes with this new fearful and changing world as well as dealing with the fact that she's pregnant.

At first no believes the stories that something is causing people to go crazy but as more and more stories are being reported people are started to believe. Although the stories varies, one key fact is that there is something that people see before going crazy. People start covering all the windows to their homes and never going outside. Malorie and her sister thought they were safe but one day her sister didn't make it, leaving Malorie to try to find a safer place to stay.

She took a hunch on an ad she saw a while back in the newspaper announcing a safe house for those in need. There was no guarantee that someone would still be there but her immediate problem was first having to go outside to get to the place.

Once she arrived at the address after a nerve wracking drive, she found herself in the company of a small group of survivors. This scenario is what you would expect with people talking about trying to figure out what's really the cause of everything, food rations, devising plans to gather more supplies, etc.

Although the story is filled with suspense there are times when the story dragged a bit with nothing more than mundane character conversations. I was also a little annoyed with the constant moving back and forth between the past and present. It was telling two stories in one, regardless if the outcome was converging into one it was still annoying.

This was an interesting read but I think it could have been much better. The story did improve near the end but just not enough.

I wish the characters had more of a personality because I didn't really get a sense of who most of them were besides Malorie, Tom and Gary. The rest were just there as scene fillers and for moving the story along.

I also found the writing could be very repetitive at times and some scenes seemed a little farfetched and I certainly didn't get my questions answered about what was really out there. However for what it's worth it wasn't a bad read but it could have been much better.