Leah's Reviews > The Woman in the Library

It was fine, as an experiment in meta storytelling. The characters were very bland and I didn't care about or suspect any of them, which I never would have put up with if it was a straight murder mystery. But since there was the layer of 'author writing the story I'm reading' to it, I accepted that the murder mystery wasn't the main point.

The emails from Leo were the only parts that provoked any kind of reaction from me, and this was noticeable in its absence from the rest of the characters. He started out slightly creepy and became consistently worse and more menacing as he went on. The only parts I found myself speculating about were his. Maybe this says more about me as a reader, but I honestly couldn't tell you a defining characteristic of any of the other characters in this book.

The parts that compelled me to continue were the meta structure bits: I wanted to find out what was up with Leo and how that section of story was going to turn out. I think she slipped a lot into very short emails and effectively built a tension in 'reality' that she failed to do in the novel her character was writing. I wish those parts were longer or more developed.