Review: THE COUPLE NEXT DOOR by Shari Lapena

 

The Couple Next Door by Shari Lapena
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It all started at a dinner party. . .

A domestic suspense debut about a young couple and their apparently friendly neighbors--a twisty, rollercoaster ride of lies, betrayal, and the secrets between husbands and wives. . .

Anne and Marco Conti seem to have it all--a loving relationship, a wonderful home, and their beautiful baby, Cora. But one night when they are at a dinner party next door, a terrible crime is committed. Suspicion immediately focuses on the parents. But the truth is a much more complicated story.

Inside the curtained house, an unsettling account of what actually happened unfolds. Detective Rasbach knows that the panicked couple is hiding something. Both Anne and Marco soon discover that the other is keeping secrets, secrets they've kept for years.

What follows is the nerve-racking unraveling of a family--a chilling tale of deception, duplicity, and unfaithfulness that will keep you breathless until the final shocking twist.

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This is the first Shari Lapena novel I've read, and it was an easy read. I was having intensive medical treatment for 6 weeks in hospital and I had a pile of books that I'd got from a secondhand book shop. This was one of them, and yeah, it kept me entertained. But I found the first half of the story was much better.

The set-up is good in terms of execution and tension and pacing--there's a missing baby and suspicion is cast from one character to another--but I also found the set-up not that plausible. Would parents really leave their six-month-old daughter at home on her own? Would they assume that she really would be fine? Because as soon as we had this set-up, I knew what was going to happen. It was kind of obvious and so, so predictable. And it also really annoyed me and made me not like the parents too.

What wasn't obvious though were developments in the second half--yes, I love when a story does this, but it didn't quite feel organic enough to the story for me. There were also so many twists being piled on top of each other by the end, and it almost felt that the author was just trying to make the reader more and more surprised. So by the time I was finishing the book, my disbelief was no longer suspended. I wasn't as on-page in the story as I had been before. I felt like I was reading the ending of a book, rather than learning what was actually going on. It was a bit infuriating really to be pulled out of the story, when on a craft level, this book had started so well in terms of set-up.

However, there was an issue with the writing that bothered me, and this was the dialogue tags. Just so many of them... I kept thinking, why not just use 'said'? But I haven't deducted a star from the review though as this book did what I wanted it to: it kept me entertained and distracted from my medical treatment, and there's no doubt that it's compulsive and a page-turner. I will be picking up more books by this author in the future.

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Review: ESCAPE FROM MR. LEMONCELLO'S LIBRARY by Chris Grabenstein

 

Escape from Mr. Lemoncello's Library by Chris Grabenstein
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Kyle Keeley is the class clown, popular with most kids, (if not the teachers), and an ardent fan of all games: board games, word games, and particularly video games. His hero, Luigi Lemoncello, the most notorious and creative gamemaker in the world, just so happens to be the genius behind the building of the new town library.

Lucky Kyle wins a coveted spot to be one of the first 12 kids in the library for an overnight of fun, food, and lots and lots of games. But when morning comes, the doors remain locked. Kyle and the other winners must solve every clue and every secret puzzle to find the hidden escape route. And the stakes are very high.

In this cross between Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and A Night in the Museum, Agatha Award winner Chris Grabenstein uses rib-tickling humor to create the perfect tale for his quirky characters. Old fans and new readers will become enthralled with the crafty twists and turns of this ultimate library experience.

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I read this book with the expectation it would be similar to The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin which I absolutely loved, and I think because I'd already read this one, I didn't enjoy EFMLL quite as much as I could have. But it was a great read. I had a lot of fun reading this, trying to work out how to escape from the library, alongside the characters--but the thing is I couldn't work out the clues. I'm an adult with a BA hons degree in Literature, and I'm currently doing my MFA. I'm also a traditionally published YA writer. I know my books. Yet a lot of the book clues for me just...didn't work. Maybe I just didn't know the right stuff. I don't know. But this made me feel a bit lost really at times. And I felt like the pace was too fast, quite dizzying. 

The library also didn't really feel like a library. Or at least not a real library. It veered into the fantastical in so many ways, and this book gave me strong Charlie and the Chocolate Factory vibes (which wasn't my favourite book as a child...)   

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Review: TWITCH by M. G. Leonard

 

Twitch by M.G. Leonard
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Can a birdwatcher outwit an escaped convict?

Twitch has three pet chickens, four pigeons, swallows nesting in his bedroom and a passion for birdwatching. On the first day of the summer holidays, he arrives at his secret hide to find police everywhere: a convicted robber has broken out of prison and is hiding in Aves Wood. Can Twitch use his talents for birdwatching to hunt for the dangerous prisoner and find the missing loot?

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Okay, so this has to be one of my favourite middle grade stories. I've been reading more of these recently as I've been writing MG too, and this is one of the books I used to for research--seeing how it's plotted, the level of 'threat' that a child MC can face, etc.

 
And I loved this story. The plot was impressively put together, tightly constructed, and entertaining to me as an adult. I could not work out who the 'bad guy' of the story was, and the twists were great. Characterisation was also superb.

This story also examines bullying and friendship, and I think it would be a good gift for a child who is experiencing trouble at school in these respects, or a child who thinks they don't quite fit in with everyone else.

 
There's also an impressive amount of bird knowledge in this book, and I learnt so much and could really feel Twitch's enthusiasm for birds.

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Review: BLANK CANVAS by Marcy Gregg

 

Blank Canvas: The Amazing Story of a Woman Who Awoke from a Coma to a Life She Couldn’t Remember by Marcy Gregg
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

When Marcy Gregg awoke from a coma, 13 years had vanished from her memory.
She was 30 years old; she thought she was still 17. She didn’t recognize the man who introduced himself as her husband. She stared at pictures of the three children they said were hers, trying desperately to remember them, but her mind was blank.

Terrified and confused, Marcy did the only thing she could think of: she faked it. She told the doctors she was starting to remember and bluffed her way through visits from friends and family. Against all odds, it worked: she was released to a home, family, and life she should have known intimately―but seemed to be a stranger’s. How was she going to pull off the biggest acting challenge imaginable―and would her memories ever return?

Ghost Boy meets What Alice Forgot in this amazing true story of a woman who lost herself and tried to fight her way back on her own―but who found unexpected beauty in hope, faith, and second chances.

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When I heard about this memoir, I was so excited to then get an ARC through NetGalley. I love memoirs and I love chronic illness memoirs. I also love memoirs about motherhood, so this seemed like the perfect book for me. But I just... I didn't like it as much as I thought I was going to.

The storyline was good, well written, well plotted out. But it was more the writing style that I just didn't particularly get on with--though it worked well enough that I was able to finish the book. But I just found myself skipping over and skim-reading a lot of the religious parts. I understand that religion is hugely important to the writer, but I can't personally relate to this, and so I was more interested in the on-page interactions between Marcy and other characters, than her 'letters' to God. There did seem to be a lot of lamentation in these letters, which is understandable. I'm chronically ill and I know the frustration--but I found it laborious to read those parts, maybe because they did hit close to home, in part.

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Review: AFTER THE RAIN by Natalia Gomes

 

After the Rain by Natália Gomes
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

'We’re alive. So let’s start living.'

Two strangers

Jack was sporty and outgoing. Alice was bookish and introverted. Their lives were on completely different paths.

One life-changing tragedy

That is before the day they were in the wrong place at the wrong time: before the day their lives were torn apart in a bombing.

A hopeful new friendship

Struggling to cope with their new worlds, their unlikely new friendship helps them find hope. But can they help each other rebuild their lives and start again?

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This was the first book I got out from the Libby app, and it was a good read. At times, I found the pacing a little slow, but it fits right in with so many other YA novels that examine bombings and terrorism, and the effects these have on the survivors. There's a surprising amount packed in here, and the characterisation was deftly done.

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Review: BEAUTIFUL WORLD, WHERE ARE YOU by Sally Rooney

 

Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Alice, a novelist, meets Felix, who works in a warehouse, and asks him if he’d like to travel to Rome with her. In Dublin, her best friend, Eileen, is getting over a break-up and slips back into flirting with Simon, a man she has known since childhood. Alice, Felix, Eileen, and Simon are still young—but life is catching up with them. They desire each other, they delude each other, they get together, they break apart. They have sex, they worry about sex, they worry about their friendships and the world they live in. Are they standing in the last lighted room before the darkness, bearing witness to something? Will they find a way to believe in a beautiful world?

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I struggled with this book, which is odd, because I also rate it highly. To me, this is one of those more experimental writings. It feels very literary, and you have to concentrate a lot to read it. Plot isn't really the point in this story. It's about character--and the characterisation is phenomenal. Rooney really paints vivid pictures of all her characters. They feel real and I felt connected at times to them, but there was also this incredible distance, like I could never truly understand them. And it was this balance between being kept close and being pushed away that really kept me coming back to the story.

The prose was challenging at times. I was in hospital at some of the points when I was dipping into this story, and I did skim-read a lot of the letters in this story, because I found I was preferring the 'present day' action, rather than when Alice and Eileen write to each other. The topics they talk about are quite 'high-brow', and I found some of this difficult to concentrate on, particularly when I wanted a light read and entertainment.

The writing craft is amazing though. There are so many amazing paragraphs to analyse. It's a story about friendship and relationships, about growing up and being an adult, about love and loss and moving forward, about expectations and societal pressure, about climate change and politics, about mental health, and about what it means to be human.

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Review: BAD WITCH BURNING by Jessica Lewis

 

Bad Witch Burning by Jessica Lewis
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

For fans of Lovecraft Country and Candyman comes a witchy story full of Black girl magic as one girl's dark ability to summon the dead offers her a chance at a new life, while revealing to her an even darker future.

Katrell can talk to the dead. And she wishes it made more money. She's been able to support her unemployed mother--and Mom's deadbeat-boyfriend-of-the-week--so far, but it isn't enough. Money's still tight, and to complicate things, Katrell has started to draw attention. Not from this world--from beyond. And it comes with a warning: STOP or there will be consequences.

Katrell is willing to call the ghosts on their bluff; she has no choice. What do ghosts know of having sleep for dinner? But when her next summoning accidentally raises someone from the dead, Katrell realizes that a live body is worth a lot more than a dead apparition. And, warning or not, she has no intention of letting this lucrative new business go.

Only magic isn't free, and dark forces are coming to collect. Now Katrell faces a choice: resign herself to poverty, or confront the darkness before it's too late.

--

This has to be one of the most emotional books I've ever read. There's a lot packed in here. Child abuse, physical abuse, domestic abuse, emotional manipulation, threat, danger. And there's the murder of a dog. Honestly, that bit really got to me and I just was in tears when that happened. That's one of the parts that stands out most to me. -- and then, of course, Katrell can raise the dead through writing letters, so we get Conrad returning. Just as we get multiple people returning, people that Katrell is paid to bring back. And it's all just...creepy. Such great horror vibes. We have Katrell's life unravelling more and more, her losing control of her magic/powers, and all this amid a serious child protection storyline as she's not being looked after.

I listened to the audio book of this, and the narrator is so good too.

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Review: NEVER SAW ME COMING by Vera Kurian

 

Never Saw Me Coming by Vera Kurian
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Meet Chloe Sevre. She’s a freshman honor student, a leggings-wearing hot girl next door, who also happens to be a psychopath. Her hobbies include yogalates, frat parties, and plotting to kill Will Bachman, a childhood friend who grievously wronged her.

Chloe is one of seven students at her DC-based college who are part of an unusual clinical study for psychopaths—students like herself who lack empathy and can’t comprehend emotions like fear or guilt. The study, led by a renowned psychologist, requires them to wear smart watches that track their moods and movements.

When one of the students in the study is found murdered in the psychology building, a dangerous game of cat and mouse begins, and Chloe goes from hunter to prey. As she races to identify the killer and put her own plan into action, she’ll be forced to decide if she can trust any of her fellow psychopaths—and everybody knows you should never trust a psychopath.

Never Saw Me Coming is a compulsive, voice-driven thriller by an exciting new voice in fiction, that will keep you pinned to the page and rooting for a would-be killer.

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Ah, how I wish I reviewed this book as soon as I finished it and not nearly a year later! Because I remember this book was good. Dark secrets, psychopaths (actual, clinically-diagnosed psychopaths, too), unreliable narrators and characters, violence, murder, sexual assault. There's a lot in this book.

Before reading this, I'll confess, I didn't know that much about the clinical diagnosis of psychopathy and what it means to have this diagnosis. I think often the figure of the psychopath is dramatized and over-villainised in popular culture and media, and this was a really interesting read, when two of our narrators were psychopaths involved in a clinical university study into their condition, and a third one was pretending to be a psychopath (I found it interesting how he'd fooled the scientists running the study, but at least one of the others in the study could see right through him).

A lot of the story focuses on Chloe wanting revenge on Will. Her reasons are justified and I found myself routing for her--her lack of guilt or empathy made it a lot easier to route for her, too. I think if this had been a character who wasn't diagnosed as a psychopath, then the lack of guilt may have changed how I viewed her slightly. But Will was an abusive and awful character, and I really felt like Chloe was justified.

Charles is probably the most memorable of the characters, though. He's more thoughtful and contemplative than Chloe, and a lot of the time he's trying to steer his life in a different direction and overcome the social stigma of his diagnosis.

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Review: BODY WORK: THE RADICAL POWER OF PERSONAL NARRATIVE by Melissa Febos

 

Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative by Melissa Febos
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

AN INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER

Memoir meets craft masterclass in this “daring, honest, psychologically insightful” exploration of how we think and write about intimate experiences—“a must read for anybody shoving a pen across paper or staring into a screen or a past" (Mary Karr).

In this bold and exhilarating mix of memoir and master class, Melissa Febos tackles the emotional, psychological, and physical work of writing intimately while offering an utterly fresh examination of the storyteller’s life and the questions which run through it.

How might we go about capturing on the page the relationships that have formed us? How do we write about our bodies, their desires and traumas? What does it mean for an author’s way of writing, or living, to be dismissed as “navel-gazing”—or else hailed as “so brave, so raw”? And to whom, in the end, do our most intimate stories belong?

Drawing on her own path from aspiring writer to acclaimed author and writing professor—via addiction and recovery, sex work and Harvard night school—Melissa Febos has created a captivating guide to the writing life, and a brilliantly unusual exploration of subjectivity, privacy, and the power of divulgence. Candid and inspiring, Body Work will empower readers and writers alike, offering ideas—and occasional notes of caution—to anyone who has ever hoped to see themselves in a story.

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I came across this book on the reading list for the Contemporary Voices module in my MFA (a module I’m auditing). Unfortunately, I couldn’t attend the lecture on this book, but as soon as I started Body Work, I grabbed a pencil because I knew I’d be annotating and underlining so much in this book.

Body Work is both a memoir and a book on writing memoir. Its essays explore feminism, patriarchy, trauma, shame, and the the healing power of writing—and all of this is done on a level I’ve never seen done before. This book was informative to read, for those writing memoir, intriguing and entertaining.

This is the first title from this author I’ve come across, but I immediately ordered two of her memoirs as she talks about her writing processes for them in this book, as she dismantles patriarchy and assesses why feminine narratives are seen as shameful so often.

Split into four sections, this book covers so much and offers thought-provoking topics. “In Praise of Navel-Gazing” encourages female writers to write their trauma unashamedly and to own their writing. “Mind Fuck: Writing Better Sex” gives advice on writing sex scenes but also encourages us to think about what sex is, especially when it’s always centered around hetero-normative constructs. “A big Shitty Party: Six Parables of Writing About Other People” documents Febos’s process as she considers who she’ll show early versions of her memoir to to check how they appear in the memoir and the importance of being kind. There’s tonnes of advice in here. And the final section, “The Return: The Art of Confession” is about trauma narratives and their healing power.

This book has so many wonderful lines on every page. I’ve never annotated a book so much and it made me critically think about my own memoirs I’m writing. I particularly appreciated the parts where Febos pointed out that we must recover all our memories to tell our stories in a complete way, including the memories we hid or blocked in order to survive.

There are thoughts about the personification of addiction and eating disorders, about abusive relationships, childhood, assault, and how writing is healing or can be. I feel I’m not doing this book justice in this review, but I highly recommend all memoir writers to read this.

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Review: NANNY NEEDED by Georgina Cross

 

Nanny Needed by Georgina Cross
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A young woman takes a job as a nanny for an impossibly wealthy family, thinking she's found her entre into a better life--only to discover instead she's walked into a world of deception and dark secrets.

Nanny needed. Discretion is of the utmost importance. Special conditions apply.

When Sarah Larsen finds the notice, posted on creamy card stock in her building's lobby, one glance at the exclusive address tells her she's found her ticket out of a dead-end job--and life.

At the interview, the job seems like a dream come true: a glamorous penthouse apartment on the Upper West Side of NYC; a salary that adds several zeroes to her current income; the beautiful, worldly mother of her charge, who feels more like a friend than a potential boss. She's overjoyed when they offer her the position and signs the NDA without a second thought.

In retrospect, the notice in her lobby was less an engraved invitation than a waving red flag. For there is something very strange about the Bird family. Why does the beautiful Mrs. Bird never leave the apartment alone? And what happened to the nanny before her? It soon becomes clear that the Birds' odd behaviors are more than the eccentricities of the wealthy.

But by then it's too late for Sarah to seek help. After all, discretion is of the utmost importance. 

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I'd been aware of Georgina Cross as an amazing thriller/suspense writer for quite a while, and I'd grabbed a couple of her novels when I saw them in a Bookbub mailing, and I don't know why I hadn't picked up one before now. What prompted me to do so is that I'm currently working on my MFA novel, which is a domestic psychological thriller for adults, and my supervisor has been teaching me methodology for scene structure. His recommendation was to read a handful of novels in my genre and pay attention to pacing, delivery of story beats, and structures. So, I browsed my kindle app and began with Nanny Needed.

I am used to YA thrillers in particular being fast right from the start (as this is what I mainly read and write), and the first thing that struck me about the opening of Nanny Needed is how measured and almost 'careful' it was in its delivery of information. It wasn't until we got to about 20% in that we found out the 'truth' about the child that Sarah is to be nanny for. And this just gave me an aha-moment. It told me what I'd been doing wrong in my adult psych thriller, as I had my first story beat happening at about 5%.

Therefore, as I kept reading, I found that I was plotting out the structure as well, paying attention to the delivery and the pacing. This kind of makes my read seem analytical--but it was also SO MUCH FUN. I could not stop turning the pages. I simply had to know what was going to happen next, and it felt like the author was always one step ahead of me. Just when I thought I was working out what was happening, something else happened that threw me off track--yet, at the end, it all tied together perfectly. And that final twist--I was actually speechless. Never before has a book made me audibly gasp like that and stare around the room wide-eyed. I did NOT see that coming--and yet, I can see all the clues were there. In fact, I'd spotted some of the clues and I knew they were significant for the ending but at the time of encountering them, I just couldn't make sense of them.

The characterisation in this story is amazing. Collette in particular is fantastically written. In fact, every single character is. There's a really strong sense of place too, like I felt I could map out the events onto the specific locations all the time.

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