Farewell Tour – Staci Layne Wilson

2.5/5 stars

I wanted so badly to like this, but it fell a little flat for me. I don’t feel like I got to know Riff as a character at all. He spent so much time doing voices of other real-world people and quoting stuff from them that he felt very cookie cutter as his own character. Then, seeing all the names of real people, real shows, and real bands got me caught up in thinking about copyrights and trademarks, which took me even further out of the story.

Joy and Seth felt really unbelievable to me. Seth was this inept assistant director who didn’t really know what he was doing and got fired for it then suddenly he was this brilliant directing mastermind who felt no emotion outside of ruthless desire to make his film no matter what? Joy was a relatively ditzy woman intent on lying about sleeping with Riff in the past and seducing him in the present, then she’s a femme fatale orchestrating a takeover in the shadows? It didn’t add up for me, and it made it hard for me to get into their characters.

This whole plot honestly confused me. I was following, though suspending my disbelief a bit, until all the flashbacks and flash forwards. I lost the plot entirely at that point, and it ended up feeling really underwhelming for me. The bit at the end too didn’t really add anything for me. It seemed like fluff with the sole purpose of hitting a word or page goal as it involved an extremely unimportant character who wasn’t involved much at all with the story.

The plot idea for this was really interesting, and I was so excited for an even cheesier slasher story, but the execution lost me. Maybe it was the author’s intent to make the characters so off-the-wall to lean into cheesy slasher plots, but I just couldn’t get there. Maybe I’ll try another book in this series and see if I get on better with it.