It can be so easy to find a mystery that is filled with highly unlikable characters. It is much more difficult to find a thriller where you are actually invested in the lives of the characters and are rooting for a majority of them. The Chateau was a great find for that exact reason. It was easy to care about the stories of the women who went to the Chateau hoping to find pieces of their lives that they felt that they were missing. Each woman was fully fleshed out and was much more than the usual caricature of a woman that seems so typical in the genre. As easy as it was to care about their lives, it was just as easy to understand how their lives could have led them to take drastic action, leading to the main conflict in the story.
The atmosphere of the beauty within the Chateau was contrasted brilliantly with the tension and constant state of unease of everyone staying within the walls of the beautiful building. This contrast helped develop the mystery itself when the actual characters couldn’t carry the plot forward at a faster pace. There were several times when reading that I found myself so wrapped up in the atmosphere that I didn’t quite notice that nothing had actually happened to advance the plot in several chapters.
The sheer number of characters and points of view was surprisingly easy to keep up with as each woman had such a distinctive voice. The only flaw with the multiple POVs was that some of the information became repetitive without actually being informative. I would have loved to see fewer scenes between the characters with a slower change between each character. It was overwhelming at times to constantly be changing characters.
I read this book while on vacation and can absolutely vouch for the fact that this book is a perfect vacation read. Despite the incredibly deep topics (please make sure to check trigger warnings), it was easy to read a little at a time and still keep up with what was happening to everyone.
⅘ stars
Thank you to Netgalley and Atria Books for the opportunity to read this eARC in exchange for my honest opinions.
The Novel Llama 