Title: The Marriage Pact
Author: Michelle Richmond
Genre: Thriller
Paperback Publication Date: 14th December 2017
Original Publication Date: 25th July 2017
Publisher: Michael Jospeh
ISBN 13: 9780718186135
Pages: 432
Started: 6th December 2017
Completed: 6th December 2017
Rating: 4.5/5
Summary: Would you stake your life on your marriage? Newlyweds Jake and Alice are offered a mysterious wedding gift – membership of a club which promises its couples will never divorce. Signing The Pact seems the start to a perfect marriage. Until one of them breaks the rules. The marriage of their dreams is about to become their worst nightmare. Because The Pact is for life. And its members will do anything to make sure no one leaves…
I received a digital copy of this book in exchange for an honest review from NetGalley. Thank you to the author, Michelle Richmond, and the publisher, Michael Joseph, for this opportunity.
Michelle Richmond is the author of several other books including The Year of the Fog and Golden State. She has won the Hillsdale Award for Fiction and the Catherine Doctorow Innovative Fiction Prize.
This book was originally published on the 25th July 2017 but the edition I have reviewed will be published on the 14th December 2017 in the UK.
I really enjoyed reading The Marriage Pact. I didn’t know what to expect from the book but it delivered so many tantalising plot twists that I just couldn’t stop reading it once I had started.
I absolutely loved the concept. One their wedding day, Alice and Jake receive an odd gift from one of Alice’s clients that she spontaneously invited to the wedding. This gift leads them into a sort of secret society or cult which is based solely around keeping married couples together. It’s all based on a set of rules set out in The Manual and violations can lead to severe punishments. The Pact makes the two main characters increasingly paranoid and it even brainwashes them to a certain degree. I don’t want to give away any spoilers but the book includes a lot of violence, including torture, and some very shady characters. There were so many plot twists too that I was just hooked on this book. The plot is fantastic and it kept me on the edge of my seat.
I think the ending, which I will not spoil, was perfect. I was so glad that the author chose that ending because it fits the book so well and it provides a very satisfying ending to such an unnerving plot.
The writing in The Marriage Pact was fantastic. It was fluid and fast paced and every single word projected the plot forward. Nothing was unnecessary added into the book and it had the right balance of description and dialogue. I really loved the narrative voice and I was surprised when I discovered that the book is written in the first person perspective of a man. I don’t know why it surprised me, it just did, but it was a fantastic choice in my opinion. You really get to experience the narrator’s paranoia but you don’t necessarily know all of his intimate thoughts until he admits them to himself. The book is almost like a diary or a memoir and that’s clear from what the narrator omits from the story until he’s willing to discuss it.
The characters were very well written. Jake and Alice, the main characters, were complex and interesting. They both had issues but they tried to be better for each other. The other members of the Pact were a mixture of normal people and suspicious characters. Jake and Alice couldn’t trust anyone and neither could I when I was reading the book.
The only thing I disliked about this book was how short some of the chapters were. Don’t get me wrong, I love a good short chapter because it adds to the suspense of a book like this, but I just thought that there were too many in the book. I didn’t really understand the purpose of it except that they seemed to mark the transitions between different days.
Overall, I loved this book. It was a thrilling ride from beginning to end and I would recommend it wholeheartedly. I’ll definitely be buying it once it’s available.
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