Unspeakable Acts of Zina Pavlou

This book is overwhelmingly engaging, though there were areas where I felt frustrated reading it. Sometimes there were moments where it felt like the characters suddenly and briefly forgot themselves, and there were other parts that I felt were somewhat unnecessary in their narrative use. Some of that comes down to personal choice.

There are a lot of story threads in this book, and some of them felt a bit too excessive. The thread about Eva (one of the main characters) and her husband Jimmy basically being married but struggling to connect was good, along with all the things that basically helped create that division. But it felt overburdened when another character, who charmed his way into Eva's sights, comes in and uses her for information. I kind of feel like that could've been done in another way that would've felt more cohesive to the story and more coherent with Eva's character.

Or, to put it another way, none of that feels like an 'earned' story? It just feels like padding that could've been replaced with something more fitting. Like, while the story does involve an aspect of 'the things men make women do for them' in so many ways, it really just felt like it disconnected Eva into the only woman (other than Zina) in her whole life. And like, that can be a good narrative thread, it just makes it feel like all Eva's moments are being suspicious of and confused by men, wondering why they won't do anything. This is something that I personally wasn't a fan of.

I also have mixed feelings because this story is based very closely (but not tightly) on a real-life murder by a Cypriot grandmother who had moved to England and was charged with killing her daughter-in-law. Many of the details do match what happened, including the fact that the grandmother spoke no English and was illiterate in Greek. This was also a core part of the story, but I felt it kept getting lost. And sometimes it felt like it was getting undermined by other parts of the story.