A Simple Plan

Heftig! Abgründe menschlichen Handelns öffnen sich hier dem Leser und man wird regelrecht in das Buch hineingezogen. Teilweise vielleicht ein bisschen überzogen und übertrieben, aber trotzdem richtig packend. Erschreckend, wozu ein scheinbar harmloser, ganz normaler Mensch fähig sein kann. Unbedingte Leseempfehlung! Aber Achtung, nichts für schwache und empfindliche Gemüter, da oft sehr gewalttätig!

Duh, I wanted to like that book so, so much! 'A Simple Plan' deals with quite an interesting topic - three men (referring to them as 'friends' is a lie) accidently stumble across a huge amount of money and decide to keep it. They work out a simple plan to make sure they won't get caught and from that moment on, everything goes wrong. The novel starts off great - for the first 50 pages or so, I really enjoyed the writing style and the characters. The four main characters are designed for you to not like them at all and that worked perfectly fine for the first few pages or so. But as soon as the three men worked out their simple plan, the author gave away the entire potential the storyline could have had. There are two main things that really annoyed me while reading: 1) the writing style. As I said, I enjoyed it for the first 50 pages or so. But after ... things happend, the biggest part of this book is Hank's inner monologue. He is literally repeating the same exact things all the time, which drove me NUTS! I skipped entire pages towards the end because it was just a repetition of what has already been said. Seriously, the story could have been told in half the amount of pages and I would have liked it WAY better without all those inner monologues. 2) the characters. As I said, the characters are obviously designed for you to not like them at all. And throughout the first pages, you can feel that you will grow to hate them. But after Hank, Lou and Jacob discover the money and have their plan set, there is no character improvement at all. Nothing! Especially Sarah - who had so, so, SO much potential to become an evil witch - was just plain boring. The one person I felt attached to towards the end was Jacob. And his dog. All other characters were ... a huge disappointment. I am so mad because this book could have been so much better, if it wasn't for these two points. It's only a 2 star rating instead of a 1 star rating because I've read worse books this year. (Side note: the ending was super, super boring! Like ... all the mess and it ends that way? Wowie.)