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comment by theNiliad
theNiliad  ·  3189 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: What book has impacted you the most?

In general there are a lot. One that's sticking out in my mind right now though is The Likeness by Tana French. On its surface it sort of seems like a run of the mill murder mystery novel - a girl is killed in a small town in Dublin, and an investigator with an uncanny resemblance to her pretends to be her for a short time to try to find out who killed her. But the psychological depths it gets to were intense. The investigator starts liking this girl's life more than her own, things like that.

But what made it impact me is that the detective ingrains herself into this close knit community of friends who are post grads at the local university. And its an amazing group of friends, like a very close family. And throughout the course of the novel she starts to realize one of them killed the girl and then it becomes about the psychological damage of unravelling this group, both for the members of it and for this detective.

It hit very close to home for me because I had just graduated from college a month before I read this. I had a very close knit group of friends like the group in the book, and I was feeling really down about the loss of that. It really felt like I had lost something irreplaceable. My dad recommended I read it because he saw how bummed out I was getting. And it did help, it sort of made me realize that yeah things are always going to change, but nothing takes away the memories and positivity I have from that time in my life. Good book.





fundude50  ·  3189 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Sounds interesting. Do you recommend reading the first book, In the Woods, first?

theNiliad  ·  3189 days ago  ·  link  ·  

It was an entertaining read but I ended up not liking it as much. The ending of In the Woods was pretty unsatisfying, but more than that each book she writes focuses on a different protagonist. The lead from The Likeness is a side character in the first one, and the lead from the first one doesn't show up in the second one except for a small cameo. I say read them in whatever order you want, but I found reading The Likeness first a good entry point and a better book overall.