Review of The Spare Room

I enjoyed We Were Never Here by Andrea Bartz so I put this on my list of 2023 Thrillers I Can’t Wait to Read. But I didn’t read the synopsis first. How did this all turn out for me? Check out my Review of The Spare Room!

The Spare Room by Andrea Bartz

Published on June 20, 2023 by Ballantine Books. Thanks to the publisher for providing an advance copy for my (honest) review.

Plot Summary for The Spare Room

Kelly’s life has turned into a nightmare: She’s friendless and jobless, and the pandemic lockdown has her trapped in a tiny apartment with the man who’s just called off their wedding.

The only bright spot is her newly rekindled friendship with her childhood friend Sabrina—now a glamorous bestselling author with a handsome, high-powered husband.

When Sabrina and Nathan volunteer to let Kelly stay in the spare room of their remote Virginia mansion, she jumps at the chance. There, Kelly secretly finds herself falling for both her enchanting hosts—until one night, a wild and unexpected threesome leads the couple to open their marriage for her.

At first, Kelly loves being part of this risqué new world. But when she discovers that the last woman they invited into their marriage is missing, she starts to wonder if they could be dangerous . . . and if she might be next.

Books by Andrea Bartz

Andrea Bartz wrote The Lost Night in 2019, and then The Herd (2020), which had a bit of buzz around it. She got a lot of publicity where her 2021 thriller, We Were Never Here, was picked as a Reese’s Book Club Pick. The Spare Room is her latest.

Also, fun fact: she is the sister of this thriller writer.

Review of The Spare Room

I was super excited to read The Spare Room, then pretty surprised by a couple of elements as I hadn’t read the synopsis before I requested it.

So, just a heads up on some things that you might want to know:

First, The Spare Room is a pandemic book. I know for some people this will be a negative, but the pandemic is mostly used as backdrop to make the characters more isolated.

Second, open relationships and polyamory are a big part of The Spare Room, though there aren’t any super-explicit bedroom scenes. I know that some thriller readers don’t want any bedroom thrills in their thrillers, though others do. So I will do a post for them soon!

Me: Okay, but where is Spare Room going with this?

Answer: around and around in circles. And then in a rectangle.

I did think The Spare Room had an interesting set-up and a lot of promise. It (almost) fits in new trend I’m seeing of modern Gothics, like Verity and the entire catalog of a TikTok famous author that I’ll be writing about soon!

But for me, all the characters in The Spare Room were not psychologically complex or consistent.

Main character Kelly was trusting, but then suspicious, then back to trusting. And around and around.

Other characters acted warm and considerate, but were also pathological liars who sweetly apologized and then lied again. Or nice, then suddenly physically violent. Just because.

Some of the choices made by the characters either didn’t make sense, or weren’t well set up in the story.

It wasn’t that the characters were hiding things, or that the book was trying to make the “we all are capable of anything” point. It was more like each character would have a new personality from page to page. Maybe this needed to be a different kind of pandemic book with a virus that made people go all “Jekyll and Hyde.”

I’m not the biggest fan of multiple POVs, but I’m thinking maybe it might have helped to have another narrator besides Kelly, because hearing her version of events was frustrating. She had goldfish brain. She’d bring up an issue, get an explanation, and then ten pages later, get all worked up about the same thing again.

Me:

While I think that The Spare had some very interesting elements, I also felt that the characters and their relationships needed more development in order to make the story hold together.

I never really got a handle on two important, longer-term relationships in the book: Mike and Kelly’s or Kelly and Sabrina’s (hmm is this Charlie’s Angels f/f fanfic?) Kelly and Sabrina had a long history that I didn’t think was sufficiently explored or used in the story.

If you read my Spoiler Discussion of We Were Never Here, you might remember that the author published an extra chapter to make things make (more?) sense. Perhaps she’s a writer who likes writing characters who can’t be pinned down. I feel like the polyamory theme is part of that, and I get it.

But it wasn’t Kelly’s romantic decisions that I had issues with, it was who she did (or didn’t trust). Red flags everywhere!

I will definitely try Andrea Bartz’s next book. Even if this one wasn’t really for me, I’m glad I gave it a try.