It’s 1986 when eleven-year-olds Jade and Bel meet in the village store. Their paths weren’t likely to have crossed before because Jade is one of the notorious Walkers – a family from the far side of the tracks – and Bel lives in a fancy house with servants. This fateful meeting is to change the course of the girls’ lives forever because by the end of it another little girl will be dead and Jade and Bel will be arrested for the murder.
This isn’t the only thing happening in Alex Marwood’s novel The Wicked Girls, though.
There’s Amber, head cleaner of Funnland, a boardwalk amusement park in the seaside town of Whitmouth (I imagined Blackpool only smaller and seedier). She lives with Vic, a handsome but slightly passive-aggressive carny. Amber lives a quiet, tidy life. She takes pleasure in overseeing her crew of cleaners and helping them when she can. When Amber discovers a dead girl in the park’s hall of mirrors, her life becomes significantly more complicated.
Then there’s Kirsty , a freelance journalist married to Jim, an out of work IT guy, and mother to a couple children. When the body is found at Funnland, Kirsty finds herself on assignment and inevitably comes face-to-face with Amber, the last person she’d ever expected to see again.
The reason: after their release from prison, Jade and Bel were given new identities and cautioned about ever making contact with each other again. Not that the girls were likely to meet; they barely knew each other to begin with.
Marwood balances the story of Jade and Bel, unspooling the narrative of what happened that long ago day with the present day Amber and Kirsty, two women who have made a desperate attempt to reinvent their lives.
As if that weren’t enough, let’s not forget Martin, creepy Whitmouth resident. He’s been rebuffed by Jackie, one of the Funnland cleaners. He’s clearly deranged and
the rage of rejection crawls beneath his skin; invisible, unscratchable. All she needs to do is text him back. He doesn’t want to go out, but if she refuses to respond he’s going to have to. As his mother was always assuring him, persistence is the most important quality in life. And he knows he is the most persistent of all.
The seemingly disparate threads of Marwood’s novel do come together, but whether you find the ending satisfying or not will depend on how you like your mysteries. There were a few super tense moments in The Wicked Girls, but there were also moments I found really slow going – not superfluous exactly. I guess I just like a little more ass-kicking and a little less naval-gazing in my thrillers. That said, the characters were definitely nuanced and sympathetic and the writing was good, but over-all I would have to say The Wicked Girls is more slow burn than page-turner. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, though.
able, folks.
Mabel Dagmar, the seventeen-year-old narrator of Miranda Beverly-Whittemore’s stunning novel Bittersweet is attending an upper-crust East Coast college on a scholarship. Her roommate, Genevra “Ev” Winslow is from an influential blue blood family. The two girls couldn’t be any more different and yet somehow Mabel finds herself invited to spend the summer at Winloch, the Winslow family compound in Vermont. Mabel has no interest in returning home to Oregon for the summer, so she gratefully agrees even though she has to help Ev prepare Bittersweet, Ev’s personal cottage, for her father’s “inspection”.
y in the summer when I just want to give my brain a break from school. Publishers always want to draw comparisons to 
writer who lives in a small flat in London. One day she receives an email invitation to a weekend bridal shower (a “hen” night) for her once best friend, Clare. The invitation is puzzling to Nora because she hasn’t seen Clare in a decade and it seems as though they may have ended things on relatively awkward terms.
Kelly’s novel tells the story of three very different women: New York socialite Caroline Ferriday, Polish teenager, Kasia Kuzmerick and German doctor Herta Oberheuser. It is 1939 and the one thing these women have in common is Adolf Hitler.
are at all a fan of Canada’s funny man, it’s worth a look. Apparently the audiobook is narrated by Short and although I don’t listen to audiobooks, I might have made an exception in this case because he does all his characters. In any case, I enjoyed reading about Short’s early life in Hamilton and his start in show business. It’s a namedropping extravaganza.
The Giver takes place in a community that values Sameness. On the surface it might even appear like a Utopia. Eleven-year-old Jonas lives in a family unit lives with his younger sister, Lily, and his mother and father. None of them are biologically connected. His life is structured around school and volunteering and ceremonies that mark the important moments in the lives of the citizens. He is apprehensively waiting the next ceremony. His mother tries to calm Jonas’s nerves by telling him
talk, too. The book is based on the true story of California history teacher Ron Jones’ social experiment. (He’s been renamed Ben Ross in this book.) The year was 1969 and Ross had just shown his senior class a film about the Holocaust. When one of his students asked how the Germans could have just sat back and let the Nazis do what they did, Ross tried to think of a way he could illustrate the power of a fascist movement. He came up with “The Wave” and began to teach his students about discipline, community and action. Although the experiment was meant to be short-lived, it grew to include a salute, slogans and even a secret police force before it was finally dismantled due to complaints from parents and colleagues.
The Ludic Reader 