u/StarryAqua

I just finished this book the other night and, while most of the book was tense and enjoyable, the ending genuinely pissed me off with all the questions and events left unanswered.

In sheer hope that I get some answers and don’t feel like I’ve wasted my time reading this book, I started decoding some of the puzzles. I’ve already translated the Morse code on the articles and decoded the hidden message with the capitalized letters, but that’s it so far. I know there’s also the glyph/cyphers on the same article and probably some other minor things I’ve missed.

But has this book been 100% unraveled yet, in which it’s enough to fully understand what the hell was happening in this book? Or do we still not know everything? Because if it’s the latter, I’d rather stop wasting my time and move on from this convoluted book.

Are there Mylar options or some other cover protectors for paperback books? I’m looking to protect some ARC paperbacks I managed to get a hold of before I get to reading them.

I'm typing this up immediately after finishing the book, and I am, no hyperbole, genuinely pissed off after finishing it.

Because, up until those last few chapters, I was enjoying the whole ride.

But I should have known better. With so many questions, so many random, obscure elements going on, and with only a few chapters left to answer ALL of them... I should have seen the red flag than and there.

But no, I was too arrogant for my own good.

By the time I was reading the final chapter, I was solely reading on the sheer hope Marcus was pulling my leg with this nonsense, and some completely, historical twist was about to come in the end that somehow wrapped it up.

But nope... it was even worse than I thought.

I've read several books in which the ending is left to reader interpretation; left open to build on discussion on what we just read. But this... it literally ends with the narrative of >!"Hey! You know everything you read up until this point? And then how it was all thrown away with the lame reveal that Eve really was someone different all along? Well... what if everything you read throughout the book DID happen, and we won't explain what's going on?!<

It's a scapegoat that makes the reader feel stupid. Because, not even the book knows what happened. It's not even a form of building up more questions for discussion: it's a means of following a trail from beginning to end in which the main character--and the reader's time--was doomed from the start with a series of story beats that, weren't forming a coherent story, but was secretly just a mish-mash of random moments that made you think, "Wow, that was cool," or "Wow, that was unexpected," leading up to the standard response: "I wonder how this all relates in the end."

I'll admit, I was enjoying the book so much that I went ahead and ordered Marcus's next book "The Caretaker," planning to read it immediately after "We Used to Live Here." But after that ending, now I can't trust if he pulls the same crap in "Caretaker" and am considering returning it.

I just... I can't believe it. I'm still pissed off, but writing this is my form of venting to calm down. I don't know if anyone else feels the same way I did. I know there's morse code and secrets built into the prose, as well as whole discussion forums for this book, but having to do research outside of the tale itself just to figure out what may be going on isn't usually fun for me.

Rant over, I suppose. Just had to speak my truth.