"The Hunting Party", by Lucy Foley

This review has been written by my Partner who has just finished the book and offered to write a review:

"The Hunting Party", by Lucy Foley is a unique book to me, it's written in the 1st-person and 3rd-person perspective depending which character is in focus at the time. This has 'pros' and 'cons' as I will elaborate on.

What is interesting is that only the female characters are written as 1st person and the male characters are 3rd person perspectives. My thinking is that as the author is a woman, that she can add a better level of detail from a woman's perspective and that's how she can add the level of detail which a man perhaps cannot. It's unique, but doesn't distract from the men playing a high level of importance in the book as well, just without the same perspective. It gives it a unique format which I've not seen before and becomes evidently useful when dealing with several characters and their perspectives on the same storyline when those characters are also in the same places together. The storyline itself is quite enclosed and is over a period of only a few days, so the level of detail in the story is higher than a lot of other books of similar type.

There is one major flaw in this method, which I found, but it's linked to the fact that I read it in small pieces. This flaw is that it's difficult to go back to the book a couple of days later and start reading a sentence with 'I said....', because the 'I' could refer to one of many female characters on any of the days in question in the story, which I couldn't always remember who, or when it was, so had to flick back a few pages each time to remind myself (the person and date was in each chapter heading thankfully). If you were reading large chunks at a time, it's not so problematic. The story itself is reasonably well written, but suffers with a lot of backstory historic detail, which actually serves very little purpose other than to bolster the reaction, or decision-making elements from the characters at that instant of the story, but doesn't become important for anything else, so some 20% of the story seems unnecessary, but does flow.

It is a story flicking between the lead up to murder, the few days preceding it and then swapping between the many characters amongst those dates as well, so it can become tricky following it if you are reading

short sections and intermittently. I found that it had a slow build-up, a few potential twists along the

way and sadly an uninspiring end, but that's subjective, because we are all individual and there was enough detail to keep me entertained along the way.

So if you enjoy bouncing between times and people and enjoy high levels of written detail, you will like this book, as it's different, but if you are expecting a single timeline and simple characters, then this one

might not suit.

I enjoyed it, but did feel the feminine bias in the writing, which some might not get on with.

5/10 overall for me.