Review: 'The Alone Time' by Elle Marr

A family's plane crashes into a forest, but only the two young daughters are found alive 11 weeks later. These weeks become known as their "alone time" and now, 25 years later, a documentary threatens to reveal secrets they hoped had remained buried. What truth will emerge? Unfortunately, what emerged was a novel that felt surprisingly messy. Thanks to Thomas & Mercer and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Pub. date: 05/01/2024
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer

Fiona and Violet Seng were just children when their family’s Cessna crash-landed in the Washington wilderness, claiming the lives of their parents. For twelve harrowing weeks, the girls fended for themselves before being rescued.

Twenty-five years later, they’re still trying to move on from the trauma. Fiona repurposes it into controversial works of art. Violet has battled addiction and failed relationships to finally progress toward normalcy as a writer. The estranged sisters never speak about what they call their Alone Time in the wild. They wouldn’t dare—until they become the subject of a documentary that renews public fascination with the “girl survivors” and questions their version of the events.

When disturbing details about the Seng family are exposed, a strange woman claims to know the crash was deliberate. Fiona and Violet must come together to face the horrifying truth of what happened out there and what they learned about their parents and themselves. Before any other secrets emerge from the woods.

I greatly enjoyed Elle Marr's The Family Bones, about a young woman who joins her family for a weekend away in the hope to learn more about their legacy of psychopathy. While The Family Bones was delightfully over-the-top, I still felt like Marr brought at least some nuance to the discussion of psychopathy. And her characters and their motivations were solid enough that you felt like you knew them and could follow their thinking process. That is what I hoped for with The Alone Time as well but unfortunately I did not get it. The rest of the paragraph will contain *mild spoilers*. Towards the end of the novel, Marr begins playing with ideas of multiple personality disorder and dissociative identity disorder as part of her twist and plot. This was incredibly popular in the early 2000s and 2010s, usually leading to people with mental disorders being vilified. I hoped we had left that behind us and yet I found some of those same instincts in The Alone Time. It also becomes mixed in with ideas of the supernatural, which does not really work and feels forced. There was no need for Marr to take the novel in the direction that she did. While every author is free to write the plot they want, I do also feel an editor or even a sensitivity reader should have flagged how these things might come across to readers.

Fiona and Violet Seng survived a plane crash and 11 weeks alone in the wilderness 25 years ago. Since then, they have stuck to their story and tried to create lives for themselves. Fiona is an artist, using natural elements for her sculptures, while Violet is giving college a third try and working on her sobriety. But with the "anniversary" of their trauma come new revelations in the form of a documentary and the resurfacing of someone who says they know more details. Fiona and Violet reconnect over this after years of no contact in order to present a united front. But there are secrets between the sisters too and so we spent much of The Alone Time looking for someone to trust. The novel is told mostly through Violet and Fiona's perspectives in the present, although we do also get flashbacks to both their parents' perspectives during the crash. Unfortunately the voices of Fiona and Violet were not differentiated enough, which means I did occasionally find myself wondering whose perspective I was currently reading. Aside from that, their characters had all the hallmarks of depth and yet they never felt fully alive to me. I'm not quite sure why, but I think the ending did much to undo any sense I had that I understood these characters.

Like I said above, I did really enjoy Elle Marr's writing in The Family Bones. It was sharp and analytic and never felt overly trite while being delightfully dramatic. I did not find that here in The Alone Time. The metaphors and analogies Marr used in her writing felt clunky, while the connections she crafted between the characters felt flat. The plotting and pacing could have done with another strict editing round, I think. There was a moment in the novel where suddenly a number of weeks had past, which deflated the tension Marr had built so far. Side characters which were suggested as potential romance partners were odd, to say the least, and their introduction added absolutely nothing except for question marks. * The spoiler warning from above is once again active here.* The character of Wes, for example, is absolutely unnecessary. His whole presence in the novel feels odd and when the pay-off comes it was not worth it. Similarly, the role of the documentary maker is oddly forced. I furthermore do not enjoy spending time in a character's head, only to find out they either lied to me or just never gave hints towards the big twist. It makes me feel like I was working for nothing. I'm currently in two minds about whether I'll want to read another Elle Marr novel. I think it will depend on the blurb, but I will go in less enthusiastically than I did with The Alone Time.

I give this novel...

2 Universes!

The Alone Time was not it for me. The different narrators were hard to keep apart, the pacing was messy, and the ending left me with countless of question marks. This novel could have done with a whole other round of editing.