Make Me Better by Sarah Gailey | Horror Fiction Audiobook Review
Alas, this one wasn't for me.
My 2 Cents for Free!
I have one more Netgalley audio to finish and then I think I have to call it quits on any and all ARC’s for a long while, if not forever. If it weren’t for the fact that I was reading this book for a Netgalley review, I would’ve definitely dnf’d it because finishing it felt like a chore. I’ve read Gailey’s books Just Like Home and Spread Me and enjoyed them but this one was a drag.
It is a story about a woman named Celia who chooses to deal with her grief by escaping to a festival/retreat that claims it will change her life. And it does, so I guess, good for her! Who doesn’t want to live on an island with weird people who never wear shoes and seem to have no privacy? Where they take all of your personal belongings and lock them up. Where the babies belong to all, and where people seem to disappear but also never truly leave?
Me, that's who! But I’m not Celia and this is her story. She is a broken, lonely soul when she arrives and seems willing to accept anything in order to find a community. She’s clearly the perfect mark for this community. The story follows Celia and her mentor/roomie/islander Easy as the book leads up to the big Salt Day of celebration. As the book moves along, we get flashbacks of Celia’s life, Easy’s life, and too many other inconsequential people on the island’s life and this is a bit of a problem. Just as things are getting semi-interesting the book switches around to another meandering POV or timeline and this becomes sometimes confusing, often exhausting and ruins the momentum for me. I reached a point ¼ of the way in where I just didn’t care where any of it was leading and ultimately where it led wasn’t anywhere I wasn’t expecting it to go.
The narration by Xe Sands also didn’t work well for me here. There were too many characters, imo, for one person to handle and this narrator had a tendency to sort of drift off a little mid-sentence and sometimes pose a sentence as a question. The tone also added to the depressive/sad atmosphere of the story which was likely purposeful but it’s difficult to immerse yourself in it for 13 hours. If you do the audio you might want to spread it out over a week or so instead of listening to it for hours on end as I did.
I’m sad to say I can only give this audio a two. I found it plodding and boring, the pace frightfully slow, the characters bland and all of the jumping around hurt my head. I did have to know all of the secrets so that kept me going but in the end the secrets weren’t worth all of the effort.
Final Rating: ⭐⭐
Publisher Plot Synopsis
You were pure once. You can be made pure again.
Celia is so tired of being alone. All she wants is to have a family―to belong to someone. That's why she's going to Kindred Cove for the annual Salt Festival held by the secluded community that lives there. They promise that healing is possible. They promise that transformation is inevitable. There is no grief at Kindred Cove, because there is no suffering. Nothing is ever lost.
Celia knows that, at that mysterious island surrounded by that impossible, ever-growing reef -- she will find herself.
She’s ready to be healed. She’s ready to be transformed.
She's ready to believe.
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