Having only read the first book in Ally Carter’s Gallagher Girls series, I was still excited when I learned she was releasing an adult novel and the plot would follow a woman who wakes up in the middle of the night in Paris with no memory and ends up on the run with a hot spy when the bad guys mistake her for her spy twin sister. It sounds like a very cliched but fun story, right?
Unfortunately, I found The Blonde Identity very disappointing, mostly due to the writing style and characterisation. The dialogue was also insufferable, there’s too much of it, of the pointless banter between these two characters, and not enough action moving the story forward. There’s a lot of tell and not show throughout their conversations and the way they speak is so annoying, like the way teenagers might speak. The woman, who has woken up in Paris with amnesia and bad guys trying to kill her, resorts to telling the hot spy “language” whenever he swears, even when he’s dealing with a nasty wound she’s cleaning it with alcohol. It sounds so unbelievable that she would react that way. She also uses the term “jerkface” a lot. Who talks like that? Do American adults really talk like that? I wouldn’t know, but I sure as hell hope not.
Another problem is just the way it’s written, the type of sentences. For example, page 138 reads, “But she didn’t turn around. She didn’t look back. And she didn’t even think about slowing down.” Another example for good measure, from page 181: “It wasn’t until they’d been walking for three blocks that he realised he was still holding her hand. It wasn’t until they’d been walking for four that he realised he had no intention of stopping.” It reads like a Young Adult romance between two teenagers, with lots of sentences that could have been edited to become one, more effective sentence. This writing alongside dual POVs within the same chapter, despite the book being written in the third person, also seemed pointless, but it does break it up more for those who might struggle more with reading larger chunks of writing. The chapters are short, too.
It’s hard to believe these characters would even like each other. It’s a vague grumpy/sunshine dynamic, but their dialogue is so insufferable I can’t fathom how they would grow to fall in love with each other within the time frame of the book, which is only six days! Their inner thoughts offer some good insights, but only occasionally, as the rest is cringeworthy and like they have not developed emotionally or intellectually as they became adults. All of this made the book hard to read, but it was easy to read in the way of its simple writing and plot. I don’t think Carter has quite grasped the art of adult fiction just yet.
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