Nothing happens and no one learns anything.

 

The Cuckoo's Cry 

By Caroline Overington

Narrated by Aimee Horne 

 

This book takes place during a COVID-19 lockdown and is about as interesting as being stuck in one. It wants to be a slow-burn suspense thriller but in reality it’s just slow. For the first four hours people just sit around inside their houses or talk to each other on Skype. There’s a very slight mystery hook but it’s left mostly undeveloped until the climax, when the book becomes an action scene from a daytime soap opera. Instead of being on the edge of their seat, the reader just feels the mild curiosity one has when watching a Lifetime drama.

The book makes some overtures of being about isolation and society’s neglect of the elderly but these are just passing observations and ultimately the book has nothing to say about them. In the end most of the characters are exactly where they began, with no lessons learned and no changes made. This would be all right if the book was making a point, but instead it just makes everything that happened feel pointless. The majority of the story is just dull and full of references to life during COVID that already feel dated a year later, then it abruptly changes from dull to nihilistic and mean-spirited without any apparent meaning or intention. It’s like you took the aforementioned Lifetime movie and tacked on the ending from American Psycho: “This confession has meant nothing.”
 

I only finished this book because I got it for free; if I had paid for it I would have returned it.

 

Overall: 1 out of 5 stars

Performance: 3 out of 5 stars
Story: 1 out of 5 stars