Hello Beautiful People! Welcome back to another review! For this one, we get into Hostage by Clare Mackintosh which follows exactly what you would think, a hostage situation and those who are involved in it.
Main Characters:
- Mina: Our main character in the book, Mina is thrown for a loop when the flight she is working on as an attendant is hijacked to spread a political message
- Adam: Mina’s husband, is left to pick up the pieces on the ground when Mina is thrown at the center of this hijacking
- Sophie: Mina and Adam’s adopted daughter (it seems like she may have autism although it’s never specified) like her dad is thrown into this hijacking when her mother is put at the center even though she isn’t on the plane
My Review
Hostage by Clare Mackintosh is a heart-racing thriller that follows Mina and her crew as their flight is taken over by hijackers. Mina is placed at the center of the hijacking when it is presented that if she doesn’t follow their orders, her family may be hurt, and they have the proof to back it up. If Mina doesn’t do what they say her family’s life is at risk, if she goes with it she puts the entire flight at risk, so what is she to do?
While I definitely enjoyed parts of Hostage by Clare Mackintosh based on the ratings and reviews it had, I was honestly expecting to like it more. I struggled with how to rate it and landed on a 6.5/10 being the best. I think what I struggled with most was I found the book was losing my attention in parts. Once the hijacking on the plane starts it’s a fascinating section, and I personally just felt as though it fell off from there. It felt to me like it dragged on a bit, and there is a side story with one of the other characters that I just found unnecessary, and it took away from the main story itself. I just kind of perceived it as filler that was supposed to add more excitement into the story but it felt a bit of the opposite to me. It was clear everyone (not talking about the plane part) would be fine so I just wanted to get through it and get back to the plane.
Something I struggled with as well that seems to be a theme with me is I really didn’t end up liking any of the characters in the book. Other than sweet Sophie I found everyone else to be kind of insufferable and selfish. It made it really hard to root for anyone, or really cling to the story and want to know what was going to happen next. There were parts in the story where even other characters on the plane were like ‘Can this thing crash already?’ and honestly I was in the same mood. As terrible as it sounds I didn’t particularly care whether or not the plane crashed or exploded or not, I just wanted the story to hurry up and get to whatever it would be. Just having to hear so many characters complain over and over again about their own bad choices as there was the potential plane crash happening that included innocent children was an eye roll. Of course, I felt bad for the few characters who seemed to be nice and were just dragged into the mess but there were like four of them total so they were outnumbered by a lot. I also found myself a bit bored by most of the characters. It might have been because there were so many of them I felt like we weren’t really getting a deep look into how most people were. I think if maybe there were some fewer characters I could have gotten into people’s stories more. Don’t get me wrong I definitely give Clare props, she’s tackling a story about a plane, and realistically planes can have like 200 people on it so she needed to have a lot of people because the plot called for it. I might just have too short of a memory to be able to remember too many characters who we don’t really get to know at all.
I did enjoy the plot itself though. I found the theme of a plane being hijacked and getting to follow the people inside as it unfolds, and those they love on the ground dealing with it unfolding really interesting. I think all the characters being unlovable was maybe a factor in the book though. With the theme and the choices that Mina has to make in the air, we as the reader are left asking what we would do. When Mina is given a note, a personal item, and a photo from that morning of her daughter on the plane, with instructions to open the piolets area for them, if she does not follow their instructions Sophie would be hurt. We the reader are left asking what we would do in this situation. Would we follow what the hijackers say to save our family, or risk our family to save everyone on the plane? I’ll be real, I don’t have children, but if it was me in this position I would never risk hundreds of people’s lives for my own child. I say this again as a non-parent but I think the choice to me at least is easy. Why would your child’s life be more important than all these other people’s? When I said earlier that a lot of the characters were selfish in this book I wasn’t even referencing the hijacking (which to be fair is filled with selfish people). It was just insane to me that so many characters in this book couldn’t think about anyone else but their own needs and desires, but I guess the whole theme of this book is how selfish can you be.
I also didn’t love the ending of this book. I’ll get into it some more later on for the people who have read the book or want it spoiled, but yeah didn’t love it. I don’t think it was terrible, and I understood what it was getting at, but it was a bit of a bummer to me. The book has decent ratings so some people definitely liked it. I would say, read at your own risk. You may like it or you may not. I don’t think it was a bad read, but I think there are definitely books within this genre and theme that may do it a bit better.
***Skip this part if you don’t want the ending spoiled***
Alright so, the big question. What happened to the plane, and why was it hijacked. The plane was hijacked because this online group was protesting climate change. If the government and the flight companies didn’t agree to take measures that would lower their emissions they would crash and or cause the plane to explode. I had a bit of a hard time with this being the reason and was honestly close to giving up. Look to a degree I got it, and maybe the author was doing this to show the stupidity of the hijackers, but if you’re going to protest climate change this is a weird way to do it. I mean yeah taking a commercial flight would allow for more hostages to maybe get a better chance of their demands being met, but logistically, doesn’t make much sense to me. Commercial flights that fit hundreds of people are not the things killing the planet. It’s people who take private planes all over the planet multiple times a week if not a day, and large corporations that are the issue. It always bothers me when protesters (climate or not) inconvenience the everyday people who are not the problem. Why take these innocent people who omit their fair share of pollution into the air every year hostages? In Canada, plastic straws and bags were banned to combat pollution which is just weird to me. I don’t doubt it will make some difference, but again I really don’t feel like it’s the everyday people and their routines that are the issue here when we talk about climate control. Just me.
The plane does not crash, which is awesome. A few people do die in the process of the flight crew overtaking the hijackers, but they do eventually do it. All the pilots are killed in the process and Mina lands the plane with help from the control people. The side plot thing that I mentioned earlier that I didn’t enjoy is that Adam Mina’s husband ends up having a gambling issue, and loses a bunch of money, and this almost gets him and Sophie killed while Mina is on the plane. First, the hijacker people tie up Adam and Sophie in the basement of their home until they know that Mina let their people take control of the plane. While they are in the basement the people that Adam owes money to try to burn down the house in retaliation almost killing the two in the process. As I suspected from the start when this whole thing happened the two are fine. Sophie also almost dies from an allergic reaction in the basement and they save her just in the nick of time. As a fellow deathly allergic peanut girly, I felt this was a bit unnecessary (and kind of unrealistic although I do have a very severe allergy hers could have been less severe) and could have gone without. Adam’s whole subplot I could have done without as well. They weren’t as exciting to me as I felt like they were supposed to be it just kind of a lot of intense on even more intense.
The end to the end is that in the future Sophie ends up joining the climate group that did the hijacking in the first place. The people her mother risked it all to save her from she ended up joining. I didn’t love this end. I mean I get that it was kind of to say that Mina’s risks were not worth it, realistically they probably wouldn’t have killed Sophie if she hadn’t gone with her demands but it made me a bit pissed on Mina’s behalf. This girl took a lot of risks for her daughter, and she doesn’t seem to really grasp that. It was a weird dark twist at the end, but it wasn’t my favourite.
*****
Have you read Hostage by Clare Mackintosh before? What did you think? Did you enjoy it?
I hope you enjoyed this review! Feel free to check out my socials @baddiebookreviews to be kept up to date for when I release a new review.
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