The Third Time Really Was the Charm with Tana French's The Likeness

Over the past several days, I've had a nice surprise about Tana French's The Likeness, a novel I very nearly decided to abandon for good at the 140-page mark because I found the basic premise of the book to be too absurd to take even remotely seriously. The only thing that kept me from giving up on The Likeness was that I had so thoroughly enjoyed both French's 2020 standalone, The Searcher, and her first Dublin Murder Squad novel, In the Woods. I was so excited about having finally discovered Tana French for myself that my reaction to The Likeness (the second Dublin Murder Squad book) really surprised me.

The novel's basic premise is this: Five highly educated young people live together in a remote house that they are in the process of restoring, three men and two women. After one of the women is stabbed to death in a ruined cottage near the house, the police immediately notice that one of their own is almost the identical twin of the dead girl. So they pretend that the stabbed girl somehow survived the attempt to kill her, and replace her with the cop. 

And that's what I found absurd. These five people were a self-contained unit that spent almost twenty-four hours a day together, and they intimately knew everyone else's little quirks and eccentricities. There is simply no way the cop would be able to pull this off...but she does. Then, to make it even worse, nothing much seemed to be happening for the first 140 pages, and I set the book aside twice for days at a time (I first started reading the book in August) because I couldn't connect with the story. 

Even then, I kind of knew that I wasn't ready yet to give up on a Tana French novel, and with a little encouragement via some of the comments recently made here on Book Chase, I decided to give the book one more shot. And it worked. Only ten or so pages deeper into the book, French finally stops focusing on only the cop's efforts to pass herself off as the dead girl, and begins to move the story forward. She develops the main characters, makes them human, and even manages to do that with the quirky side-characters. 

Suddenly, I was finding it hard to put down The Likeness instead of finding it so difficult to keep turning its pages. I found myself more than willing to suspend my early disbelief of the plot and I'm now totally caught up by the story and characters. I'm down to the last 70 or so pages of this 466-page novel, and I can't wait to see how it all ends. 

I'm fairly quick to permanently abandon books these days, figuring that there are only so many reading-days still ahead of me, and that there is no reason to waste any of those days on books I don't enjoy or learn something useful from. So giving a book three tries is a first for me, and I'm really happy that I did it. Many thanks to the commenters who encouraged me to give it another go.