The Unwedding by Ally Condie * *

The Unwedding by Ally Condie was a genuine disappointment for me, which is a shame, because the premise should have been a slam dunk. A luxury resort. A holiday setting. Murders that turn paradise into something claustrophobic and dangerous. I love mysteries that ruin people’s vacations. Hotels, beaches, cruise ships. That is my favourite playground for crime fiction.

Unfortunately, the setting is almost the only thing this book gets right.

I gave up at around 43%. Out of curiosity and stubbornness, I looked up the solution at the end, hoping it might convince me that the long, meandering middle was worth pushing through. It didn’t. If anything, it confirmed my decision to stop.

My biggest problem is Ellery, the main character. We are firmly inside her head in third-person limited, and it is not a pleasant place to be. Ellery is going through a divorce; her ex has already moved on. That could have been handled with anger, bitterness, even sharp self-reflection. Instead, we get page after page of wallowing. Endless, melodramatic wallowing. She lies in bed and sobs. She spirals. She narrates her loneliness as if the man who left her was not, very clearly, an AH.

I do not want to read this. I really do not.

Large portions of the book are then taken up by flashbacks to an accident. I will avoid spoilers, but these scenes dominate the narrative and stall everything else. When we are not reliving that trauma, we are told again and again how much Ellery misses her children. These are not toddlers. It reads less like maternal grief and more like emotional dependency.

Meanwhile, people are being murdered. Or rather, they are technically being murdered, somewhere in the background, while Ellery focuses almost entirely on her own misery. For a mystery novel, that is a problem.

Then there is the pacing. Or lack of it. When I tried to read about the resolution, it felt like pulling teeth from a mouth with a million of them. Every attempt to explain what actually happened is interrupted by yet another digression.
Just tell us. Just say it. Get to the point.

Instead, the book circles itself endlessly, introducing side issues, postponing reveals, and padding what should have been a tight mystery with material that feels neither necessary nor convincing.

One particular subplot, presented as some kind of hidden, shameful issue, made me roll my eyes. I have studied real-life cases like this. People in that position do not hide it. They talk about it. They advocate. They use their visibility to make a difference. The way it is handled here makes no sense, narratively or socially, and feels included purely for manufactured drama.

By the end of my reading experience, I was not curious. I was irritated.

If you enjoy a highly melodramatic main character, emotional side quests stacked on top of emotional side quests, and a mystery that feels like an afterthought rather than the engine of the story, you might get something out of this. If you are here for atmosphere, tension, or a satisfying unraveling of a crime, I would look elsewhere.

This book had all the ingredients for something sharp and compelling. Instead, it drowned them in self-pity and forgot to solve its own mystery.