🎧 ARC Review: Ocean State by Stewart O’Nan

My review: 3.25 ⭐

It was an interesting way to read a story when you already know whodunit to whom. I am not really sure this should be categorized as a mystery or a thriller ~ I was not on the edge of my seat at all. It’s very high school ~ young adult, with a love triangle between 2 girls and a boy.

It’s told in alternating pov’s between Angel ~ the murderer, Marie ~ the sister, Carol ~ the mother and Birdie ~ the victim.
Although I quite enjoyed Sara Young as the narrator, I do wish I read this instead of listened.
At times it was difficult for me to know who was telling their part of the story. Perhaps 4 different narrators would have worked best for this one.
Needless to say this was a quick listen coming in at under 6 hours, (the book is 240 pages) that kept me awake and invested in what was going on, even though I wasn’t overly wowed. I would give this author another shot.

*Thanks to Netgalley, Dreamscape Media LLC and Stewart O’Nan for the advance audiobook. I am voluntarily leaving my honest review*

Book blurb: Release date ~ March 15, 2022

In the first line of Ocean State, we learn that a high school student was murdered, and we find out who did it. The story that unfolds from there with incredible momentum is thus one of the buildup to and fallout from the murder, told through the alternating perspectives of the four women at its heart. The murderer Angel, her mother Carol, and the victim Birdy, all come alive on the page as they converge in a climax both tragic and inevitable. Watching over it all is the retrospective testimony of Angel’s younger sister, Marie, who reflects on that doomed autumn of 2009 with all the wisdom of hindsight.

Angel and Birdy love the same teenage boy, frantically and single mindedly, and are compelled by the intensity of their feelings to extremes neither could have anticipated. O’Nan’s expert hand paints a fully realized portrait of these women but also weaves a compelling and heartbreaking story of working-class life in Ashaway, Rhode Island. Propulsive, moving, and deeply rendered, Ocean State is a masterful novel by one of our greatest storytellers