Thoughts on - Beautiful Ugly by Alice Feeney

Spoilers for books - Beautiful Ugly by Alice Feeney and The Perfect Marriage by Jeneva Rose

I usually like Alice Feeney's books. But in this book I felt cheated after the final twist. That it was the husband who was actually lying down in the middle of the road and tried to kill her wife. I've recently read a The perfect marriage. In that book too towards the climax we get to know that the wife herself has killed the mistress. So during all the POV chapters of wife, there would never be a line like - "I'll have to find who killed her. I'll have to get to the bottom of this secret". It would always be - "I'll somehow have to get out of this legal mess". We would be thinking she's hoping to get her husband out of the mess. But it's more of her getting out of the mess.

But in this book during the POV chapters of husband, he talks about "I don't know what happened to her". And that's true he doesn't actually know if he successfully killed her. He knows that she disappeared. But there of lot of other places where it'll be written - "He doesn't know what happened that night on the road. He feels broken because of her disappearance". Those parts shouldn't have been if he was the one who actually did the deed.

I get the whole unreliable narrator thing. But the cleverest aspect of such books is the writing. How cleverly author states or misses out some facts but we're blind to the reality. In The Perfect Marriage (I didn't like this book too for other reasons) author hides the true nature of wife by simply not bringing up that aspect of her thoughts. But here the POV chapters are essentially narrator lying to the reader, and not narrator lying to the audience in the book.

I felt the whole thought of women living on the island thinking - "An extreme example of positive discrimination but with best of motives" as foolish. There's no such thing as "positive" discrimination.

All that being said I still like Alice Feeney's writing. And for me - "Rock Paper Scissors" will be my most favourite novel among hers.

I also liked the idea of a couple saying - "I hope you die in your sleep" to each other. Because that's the best possible death you can expect for you partner.