The Man Who Didn’t Call by Rosie Walsh Review

I have to admit that, when I picked up The Man Who Didn’t Call by Rosie Walsh, I’m mad that I believed the promise of “Seven perfect days…” on the cover. Actually, scratch that, I’m mostly pissed at Amazon who labelled this book “The Incredible OMG Love Story” because… where the frick was the love story???

Deep dive on The Man Who Didn’t Call (spoiler-free)

The romance

The premise is brilliant on paper: Sarah meets Eddie. They spend a supposedly life-changing week together, then he loves for a holiday, promises to call, and doesn’t. No calls. No texts. No explanation.

I should’ve felt devastated for poor Sarah, but I didn’t. Do you know why? We hardly see anything of Sarah and Eddie falling in love before he disappears. The author gave me no reason to care. Throughout the entire novel we get only fragments of this magic week, but it’s still nothing deep enough to make me feel anything.

Plus, Sarah’s reaction is insane. She doesn’t grieve, she combusts. Instead of feeling heartbroken for her, I was cringing at the page and became genuinely worried for her sanity. If the romance had been fleshed out a little more or if we knew her better I might’ve understood her pain a little more.

The mystery

And yet, I could not stop reading. Walsh drip-feeds just enough information to keep you hooked, and I have to give props to the author for making the “why” so addictive, even when the rest of the book wasn’t.

And the twist was incredible. I was properly blindsided, flipping back to see how I could possibly miss it, and for all my frustrations with this book, the reveal was flawlessly done.

Characters

Sarah has depth, and I liked her backstory even though we didn’t understand most of it until the end. Everyone else, however, felt paper-thin. Eddie is more concept than person for most of the novel, which I felt was a huge problem when the entire plot depends on believing in him and his relationship with Sarah.

The supporting cast also barely register. It’s not that I didn’t like them, they just weren’t particularly memorable.

The writing

The writing was pretty good, but the tone flip-flops between kinda purpley and clipped. Perhaps this was a stylistic choice to symbolise Sarah’s spiral into insanity, but the inconsistency kept taking me out of the story and the result was a book that felt like it couldn’t decide who it was trying to be.

Final verdict on The Man Who Didn’t Call by Rosie Walsh

This is not a romance, no matter what the marketing tells you. And I fully blame the marketing for all the poor reviews of this book! Almost every negative review is from people like me, pissed because they went in expecting to be swept off their feet in a romantic mystery only to find hardly any of their romance actually ON the page.

However, as a mystery alone, it totally works and the twist is so good it almost makes up for everything else.