I give The Rift 2.5 Stars

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You can read the Goodreads synopsis for The Rift here.

 

Reading some of the reviews I feel as though there is a division between people who read this book. They either enjoy it or they dislike it. There doesn’t seem to be much of a middle ground – sadly I fall into the latter category. I came to this book with no knowledge about it at all, I had read the back and decided to give something random a go, so with that I had no idea what to expect from the author. Now before I continue, I want to take a moment to praise Nina Allan, as you can tell a lot of work did go into this book.

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On to the review, firstly, some of the sentences in this story were really long and almost overly confusing at points. I would find myself reading and having to go back and re-read because the sentence was not clear enough. It was jumbled, almost like the sentence was figuring out how it was going to end mid-way through. The use of similes and metaphors were almost completely alien to the context. They felt forced like someone had told the writer that she didn’t use enough in another story and this was an attempt to show how many she could use. They left me feeling disconnected from the story.

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The Rift is deemed a sci-fi novel and for the most part it is. However, it plays a lot on the alien feeling and the questioning we experience with sci-fi. Are they real? Do they exist? Do we really believe that there is a green Martian running around somewhere? This concept and idea was something I found truly interesting throughout the novel, sadly it seemed to fall flat. By the end of the story I didn’t really know what I was reading or what I was supposed to be seeing from the story. It could have had real potential to turn psychological and really mess with the readers minds, but instead it felt diluted.

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