Rating - ⭐⭐⭐
"Her pupils killed her daughter.
Now, she will have her revenge.
After calling off her engagement in wake of a tragic revelation, Yuko Moriguchi had nothing to live for except her only child, four-year-old Manami. Now, following an accident on the grounds of the middle school where she teaches, Yuko has given up and tendered her resignation.
But first she has one last lecture to deliver. She tells a story that upends everything her students ever thought they knew about two of their peers, and sets in motion a maniacal plot for revenge."
Confessions is a standalone mystery thriller novel written by Kanae Minato and translated by Stephen Snyder.
An explosive premise ruined by its execution. Or maybe ruined is too harsh of a word, because this wasn't bad per se, but this wasn't all that it was hyped up to be for me. This premise really did initially pull me in though; a teacher gathering her class together lets a bombshell of a reveal go as she states that she knows her daughter's killers are among them. This sounded like it was going to be a riveting story, but once I realized the story wasn't going in the direction I expected it to my interest was mostly lost.
I can maybe take the blame for that because of my expectations going into it though, as I thought that the entire book was going to be about Moriguchi trying to figure out which of the students did in fact kill her daughter. In reality, that lasted all but one chapter and what we get instead is mostly a revenge story. While revenge stories can still be captivating to read, it was the way the story was written that put me off a bit.
After an entire chapter's long monologue (I am talking about almost a quarter of the book here), we proceed to cycle through different perspectives of the students who are dealing with the aftermath of the reveal. I struggled with this for a few reasons. For one, the story got a bit repetitive as it pretty much went over the same information just from a different perspective. Secondly, though this could be my fault, I found it really hard to differentiate between Naoki and Shuya. I don't know why, but I ended up mixing the two and got myself incredibly confused. Or maybe it just wasn't clear enough.
Either way, the author just didn't deliver a satisfying story to me. I wanted more time to be spent with Moriguchi figuring out the killers, and I also wanted to see the full extent of her revenge. Overall though, this still could work for other readers, it just wasn't my kind of mystery thriller.