Rock Paper Scissors – Alice Feeney

Summary

Think you know the person you married? Think again…

Things have been wrong with Mr and Mrs Wright for a long time. When Adam and Amelia win a weekend away to Scotland, it might be just what their marriage needs. Self-confessed workaholic and screenwriter Adam Wright has lived with face blindness his whole life. He can’t recognize friends or family, or even his own wife.

Every anniversary the couple exchange traditional gifts – paper, cotton, pottery, tin – and each year Adam’s wife writes him a letter that she never lets him read. Until now. They both know this weekend will make or break their marriage, but they didn’t randomly win this trip. One of them is lying, and someone doesn’t want them to live happily ever after.

Ten years of marriage. Ten years of secrets. And an anniversary they will never forget.

Review

Right after finishing the book, I gave it 3 stars on Goodreads, but upon digesting it better, I decided to change my rating to 2.5. It could have been higher, but I’m just such a miserable person! I dare to, uh, use a rating system as it is supposed to be used?

While I enjoyed the writing of most of the book, I can’t forgive the need for so many gotcha moments, of badly attempting quotable sentences, and that god awful string of “twists” that the ending was.
I immediately took one star off because “people that rate a book 1 star are miserable!!” Please, get off your high horse. I also didn’t know we still called abortions “killing babies.”

What? So with prosopagnosia, you absolutely can’t recognise faces. Ok. But you also can’t tell different bodies from each other or hear how voices differ? Come on now.

There are also a lot of inconsistencies, as so many people have pointed out, but there’s one scene in the very beginning where Amelia takes Adam’s phone out of the car and purposely leaves it behind before their trip, but Adam knew she had done this. So then why does he repeatedly search for his phone in the car and get mad?

The ending had way too many things going on with so many plot holes; it feels like this is a book for someone who has never, ever read a thriller and has heard that a book is good only if there are unbelievable twists at the end.

If Alice Feeney is going to be like this, I don’t want it.

Click for spoilers!

The anniversary letters are from Adam’s previous wife, Robin, not Amelia. Amelia and Robin used to be friends until Amelia transformed herself to be like Robin in order to steal Adam and Robin’s lives. Robin is also the daughter of the author Adam idolises and works for.

After Amelia destroyed Robin’s life, she retreated to her father’s cottage and set a trap for Adam and Amelia, luring them in there to get revenge. In their final confrontation, Robin reveals to Adam that it was Amelia who killed his mother in a hit-and-run, however, it is later revealed that it was actually Adam who was driving.