 Hello everybody, E here. Welcome back to another book review. Today we are talking about Megan Giddings Lakewood. I listened to this in the audiobook through Scribe. I'm going to give a word of warning right off the bat. I possibly didn't like this book as much as I maybe should have because it wasn't a bad book. I'm going to get to my criticisms here in a minute, but the audiobook, the narration felt forced. It felt stiff. It was especially in the narrative. Like the dialogue was fine, but for some odd reason, I just could not gel with that when people weren't talking, I did not like the way that the narrator did the narration. I mean, I don't have any other way to put it. One of the things right off the bat that I absolutely loved about this book was the characters. I look for character pacing and dread, and I consider this a horror novel. I'm not sure where it's actually, you know, if it's a thriller or whatever, but it's about a woman who answers an ad for test subjects, and she goes off and the whole book is not really a metaphor, but it's like, instead of, you know, the syphilis experiments that they did on black people, all that stuff, that stuff never stopped. But it also does exist in this world also. So it's just like a perpetuating cycle of mistreatment of black people to further science and save the country. Do you want to die for your country? That kind of thing or be tortured basically is what this is. Now let me talk about the dread. The dread was off the charts for the first third of the book. And then for some odd reason, I stopped caring. I think there was a lot of great stuff in here, but going directly into the next thing that I look for, pacing, this book is so bogged down in the middle of the book. I didn't care about any of the testing that was going on, what was happening, the main character of Lena, I loved her death or grandma, I loved these characters. It just didn't give me enough to not enough stuff, not enough different stuff happened. It was the it was a constant barrage of these tests. And I know that was the whole point of the book. I hate to down on it because I did enjoy the writing. I did enjoy the characters. But the pacing in the dread was so iffy, man. Sometimes I would feel just utter, holy crap, what's going to happen next. And then other times I was like, when is this scene going to be over? I don't want to give any spoilers or anything. So I refrain from that. But I did enjoy the book. I'm going to give it three stars. The books that I'm iffy about are always harder for me to review because I don't have too much good and too much bad to say and only tell you, you know, my own personal experience. And my own personal experience with this one is it was okay. And I know that's two stars on Goodreads. But this book does not deserve two stars. The writing and the characters are excellent. And I love the message. I love the actual themes and everything that were in the book. I just don't think that the delivery, I think it could have been honed down, maybe merge some of the tests so that it's just not the whole middle of the book. But I was at the beginning of the book, I was hollering at Lena, I was like, get out, just just run. Don't don't do anything with these people. And I don't know. I don't want to say that it's, you know, it was unbelievable. But it's just like there were so many red flags, right? But when you need money, you need money, you know, when you need a job, you need a job, that kind of a thing. And people do stuff, you know, all the time. So I can't really call it unbelievable because it is it is believable this stuff happens. But there were certain times like why are you it's kind of like screaming at, you know, someone in a horror movie when they're running upstairs instead of out the front door, like they pass by the front door to run upstairs. That kind of thing where there's no exit. With this one, it kind of felt the same way. But she was Lena is in between is in between a rock and hard place, broke needs money. And this thing comes along paying really, really well. But some of the contracts, I was like, nope, I'd have been out of there. But then again, I'm in a pretty good position. So I can't really say what I would do in that situation. Looking back to times when I was homeless or whatever, would I have done this? Maybe, you know, I possibly could have. But I've always been terrified of stuff like that. That's one of the reasons why I picked up this book, because I've always been scared about, you know, clinical trials and things like that, because that they're testing stuff on humans. Something goes wrong. There ain't no fixing it. But anyways, have you read Lakewood by Megan Giddings? If you have, please let me know what you think down there in the doobly doo. If you had a better experience or worse experience, let me know why you had a better or worse experience so that we can have a conversation. But until next time, I have been E, you have been U. This has been another book review. I'll talk to you guys later. Bye bye.