Watching Edie – Camilla Way

Posted on June 24, 2017 by Christie

Camilla Way is a new-to-me author, but after reading Watching Edie I would definitely watchingedie be amenable to reading more. Told by two characters Heather (who narrates ‘Before’) and Edie (who narrates ‘After’), Watching Edie is about the adolescent friendship between the two girls, their subsequent estrangement and what happens when Heather re-enters Edie’s life many years later.

Edie, 33, is living in London when the literal knock on her door comes.

I’m entirely unprepared for what’s waiting for me beyond the heavy, wide front door and when I open it the world seems to tilt and I have to grip the doorframe to stop myself from falling. Because there she is, standing on my doorstep, staring back at me. There, after all this time, is Heather.

It’s clear that whatever happened between the two girls has taken its emotional toll; however, Edie invites Heather in for tea and they make polite conversation. Nevertheless, Edie is suspicious of Heather’s re-appearance in her life even though she has “imagined this, dreamed of this, dreaded this, so many hundreds of times for so many years.”

Heather’s narrative fills in the back story of how the two girls met at the end of Year 11. (In England, students would be sixteen at this point, destined to move on to A-levels or employment.) Heather is a bit of a loner at school, so while she is outside with her peers, she’s not joining in on the fun. That’s when she first sees Edie.

As I watch, her facing appearing and then disappearing behind others in the crowd, she stops, her eyes squinting up at the building before darting around herself again and then finally landing upon me. I hold my breath. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone so pretty before, not in real life.

The girls, despite their differences, bond over their shared fraught parental relationships and their hatred of their hometown, Fremton, which Heather describes as “horrible.” And then, Edie meets Connor. Heather doesn’t like him on sight, although he’s “very handsome.” She doesn’t understand “this strange heat that’s there in the crackling, held-breath space between them; I only know that it has no place for me.”

Heather makes another present-day appearance in Edie’s life after the first reunion. And this time, Edie is grateful. She’s just given birth to her daughter, Maya, product of a one-night-stand with a co-worker and she’s sunk into a horrible post-partum depression. Heather arrives — one can only imagine she’s been nearby, watching — and takes over, looking after the baby, letting Edie sleep for hours at a time, but also cutting Edie off from her Uncle Geoff, her closest relation. When Edie befriends a new neighbor and starts to come out of her funk, she sends Heather away again.

It’s clear that something traumatic has happened between the two girls, but Way doesn’t give up the secret easily. Heather is actually, especially in her sixteen-year-old incarnation, a very sympathetic character. Edie has many redeeming qualities, but her life is seriously derailed when she meets Connor. The girls’ story is both heartbreaking and horrific and it makes for riveting reading.

Stolen – Lucy Christopher

Posted on May 22, 2017 by Christie

Sixteen-year-old Londoner Gemma is in the Bangkok airport, a stop-over on her way to a family vacation to Vietnam. She’s just had a fight with her parents and she’s gone off on her own to grab a coffee and cool down. That’s when she notices the man. He’s hard to miss because he “had that look in [his] eyes, as though [he] wanted something from me.” Gemma, on the precipice of adulthood, is drawn to the man and “those blue, blue eyes, icy blue, looking back at me, as if I could warm them up.”

stolen This encounter is the beginning of Gemma’s journey in Lucy Christopher’s debut novel Stolen. Before Gemma has even realized what’s happening, the man is buying her coffee, introducing himself as ‘Ty’ and engaging Gemma in a conversation that makes her feel “grown-up, sitting there with the most handsome man in the café, drinking a coffee he had just bought for me.”

But then, things change for Gemma. When she wakes up – hours or days later – she is far away from her family, alone in the Australian outback with Ty. Thus begins a period of captivity for Gemma. Ty claims to have stolen her as a way to keep her safe, although from what, Gemma cannot discern.

Ty has clearly been planning this kidnapping for a long time. He slowly reveals parts of his life to Gemma and in some ways he is a sympathetic character – until you remember that he’s taken a sixteen-year-old girl away from her family and friends. The harsh landscape is alien to Gemma; they truly are in the middle of nowhere. Although there is a vehicle, Gemma has no idea where she is or how to find help. Although Ty has not physically harmed her, Gemma is constantly worried that he’ll soon tire of her and kill her. If he doesn’t, any number of poisonous critters or the harsh conditions might get her.

It all makes for a pretty compelling read. Gemma slowly begins to adapt to her new reality and begins to trust that Ty doesn’t want to harm her and the book’s strange and alien landscape (he captures a wild camel, for instance) begins to work its peculiar magic on both Gemma and the reader.

In some ways, the book reminded me of an old movie from the 1970s, Sweet Hostage. In that film, Martin Sheen picks up hitchhiker Linda Blair and takes her to his version of ‘Xanadu’. Under his tutelage, Blair begins to see the world as a much more beautiful place than her hard-scrabble upbringing would have her believe it is, but you can’t argue with the fact that she was, in fact, kidnapped. Both the movie and Christopher’s novel plumb the depths of Stockholm Syndrome.

Christopher’s novel certainly offers something new to the YA genre and many teens will find Gemma’s story riveting.

Behind Her Eyes – Sarah Pinborough

Posted on April 1, 2017 by Christie

Louise is a single mom to six-year-old Adam. She has a penchant for wine, smokes (although not in front of her son) and could stand to lose a few pounds.

My life is a blur of endless routine. I get Adam up and get him to school. If I’m working and want to get in early, he goes to breakfast club. If I’m not working, I may spend an hour or so browsing charity shops for designer castoffs that will fit the clinic’s subtly expensive look. Then it’s just cooking, cleaning, shopping until Adam comes home and then it’s homework, tea, bath, story, bed for him, and wine and bad sleep for me.

Adele is the wife of David, a doctor. Their marriage is clearly rocky, The new house, David’s new practice, the fact that Adele is beautiful, none of it seems to make any difference.

Why can’t he still love me? Why can’t our life been as I’d hoped, as I’d wanted, after everything I’ve done for him? We have plenty of money. He has the career he’d dreamed of. I have only ever tried to be the perfect wife and give him the perfect life.

Adele and Louise take turns narrating in Sarah Pinborough’s novel Behind Her Eyes. behind Their lives intersect when Louise meets David at a bar and they share a ‘moment’ and then she discovers he’s her new boss and then she bumps into Adele (literally) in the street. Louise is charmed by Adele who seems wholly glamorous and somehow innocent. Adele takes Louise on as a project, encouraging her to quit smoking and join the gym. Soon the women are sharing a close friendship which is complicated by the fact that Louise is in love with David and pretty soon the two have moved from the ‘moment’ to a full-on relationship.

Behind Her Eyes is full of conveniences. Louise’s ex-husband takes Adam away to France for a month leaving Louise the freedom to sleep with David and have coffee with Adele. She is bereft of friends except for Sophie, an unemployed actress married to a music exec. Despite the fact that Sophie continually sleeps around on her husband, she turns sanctimonious when discussing Louise’s affair with David, telling her that “having an affair is a big enough secret and not one you’re really cut out for.” Louise and Adele bond over the fact that they both suffer from night terrors.

The novel drops a breadcrumb trail of then, which allows the reader a glimpse into Adele’s murky past — parents killed a fire that destroyed part of the estate where she grew up, a stint in some sort of care facility, a close friendship with a fellow patient, Rob. In the now, Adele is less transparent. She is clearly duplicitous, we’re just not sure how or why.

Behind Her Eyes was a book club pick and although some of the women in my group enjoyed reading the book –even I did to a point — I don’t think any of us would say we loved it. I definitely didn’t. Perhaps you could argue that the clues were there all along and I know all the BIG NAME readers out there loved the novel’s twist, but for me – I just felt cheated. Way too deus ex machina for me.

That said — I am in the minority for sure and if nothing else, Behind Her Eyes will get you turning the pages.

The Kind Worth Killing – Peter Swanson

Posted on February 26, 2017 by Christie

kindworth I have been in a bit of a reading slump this year – which seems like a ridiculous thing to say considering we are only two months in. The first couple of books I read at the start of 2017 were lackluster at best, and I just haven’t been able to find my reading groove. Peter Swanson’s The Kind Worth Killing may have actually changed all that.

Lily Kintner and Ted Severson meet in a bar at Heathrow. Over martinis, Ted discloses a few details about his life including the fact that he thinks his wife, Miranda, is having an affair with Brad, the contractor that is building their dream home in a coastal town in Maine.

Ted admits to Lily that he wants to kill his wife. Perhaps even more unusual, Lily offers to help. It might take a teensy bit of suspension of disbelief to believe that a cuckolded husband would meet a beautiful woman in a bar in a foreign country who expresses a desire to help him plan his wife’s murder, but stranger things have surely happened.

Once on the plane, Lily suggests that “…since we’re on a plane, and it’s a long flight, and we’re never going to see each other again, let’s tell each other the absolute truth. About everything.” During the trans-Atlantic flight, the two reveal tidbits both mundane and philosophical. Lily remarks: “…everyone is going to die eventually. If you killed your wife you would only be doing to her what would happen anyway. And you’d save other people from her. She’s a negative.”

Lily isn’t quite as forthcoming about her life as Ted is about his. Her story is revealed in alternating chapters. The daughter of bohemian academics, Lily is an intelligent, thoughtful child. Through her eyes, we learn about growing up in “Monk’s House,” a Victorian mansion deep in the Connecticut woods, about an hour from New York City.

There was never only one guest at Monk’s House, especially in the summertime when my parents’ teaching duties died down and they could focus on what they truly loved – drinking and adultery. I don’t say that in order to make some sort of tragedy of my childhood. I say it because it’s the truth.

Lily has a skewed morality, but it’s the very thing that makes her such a fascinating character. She’s a charming psychopath, and it’s almost impossible not to like her, to root for her, even. She’s – by far – the most interesting of cast of characters in Swanson’s novel. She reminded me a little bit of Alice Morgan, a character in the brilliant BBC crime series, Luther. (If you haven’t ever seen the show, you must watch it immediately. It’s on Netflix.)

There are twists and turns aplenty in The Kind Worth Killing. The plot did unravel slightly for me towards the end, but that in no way undermined my enjoyment of the shenanigans these people got up to.

The Kind Worth Killing was a whim purchase for me. I needed a book for my book club and this one was popular on Litsy. I am pleased to report that everyone in my group really enjoyed the book, even though it was definitely a departure from the sort of stuff we normally read.

This is a page-turner.

Where They Found Her – Kimberly McCreight

Posted on January 11, 2017 by Christie

9200000033245456 I’ve had a slow start to the 2017 reading year. Usually I power though a handful of books over the Christmas break, but this year I tended to binge-watch Netflix (The Fall – check it out if you haven’t already seen it) and sleep. I have about a half-dozen novels started, but none of them really grabbed me. Although it rarely happens to me, I’ve been in the book doldrums. I needed something to grab me by the throat and swing me back into reading gear. I chose what I was sure was going to be a winner, but I was disappointed. I did finish though.

Where They Found Her is the second book by Brooklyn-based novelist Kimberly McCreight. I read her debut novel, Reconstructing Amelia last year and loved it. It was one of those books that you just couldn’t put down and was well-written to boot. A literary win-win. Where They Found Her didn’t work for me at all.

When the body of an infant is found floating in the creek at Essex Bridge, Molly Anderson gets the call to check it out. She’s the Lifestyles reporter for the Ridgedale Reader and crime wouldn’t normally be her beat, but she’s the only one available to cover the story.

Molly’s at a fragile point in her life. She and her husband, Justin, are new in Ridgedale, a bedroom community in New Jersey. Justin teaches English at the local college and their daughter, Ella, is in kindergarten. Life is just starting to settle down after the death of Molly’s unborn baby, so the discovery that the body at the creek is also an infant is almost more than Molly can handle. She’s plucky, though.

On the other -shittier – side of town lives sixteen-year-old Sandy and her floozy of a mother, Jenna. Sandy is the adult in that relationship. She loves her mother, but she’s also tired of being the adult.

Barbara is the Stepford-wife of Steve, the town’s police chief. Her daughter, Hannah, is tutoring Sandy so that Sandy can graduate. Her young son, Cole, has been sucking all the oxygen from the room with his odd behavior.

Although it won’t be immediately obvious how the lives of these women intersect, their paths will cross and that’s when the gears started to grind for me. (It took me about 100 pages just to keep all the names straight – and that’s only a slight exaggeration.)

In all the ways that Reconstructing Amelia was a tightly focused story about a mother and daughter who are close, but still keep secrets from each other, Where They Found Her borders on melodrama. As Molly starts to unravel the identity of the baby and what happened to her, the reader will, too. There’s a fair share of red herrings, but everything gets tidied up in the end.

I turned the pages (once I got going), but I can’t say that I cared very much about any of the players and, for me, that’s one of the failings of McCreight’s novel. Where They Found Her just didn’t resonate on any level with me. I’m definitely in the minority, though. Critics loved it.

So – decent mystery (red herrings and tidy-ending aside). McCreight can certainly write and I would definitely read her again. But Where They Found Her was only so-so for me.

Vanishing Girls – Lauren Oliver

Posted on September 24, 2016 by Christie

Now that I am back at school, it’s time to start reading YA fiction again. I give it a little break in the summer so that I can tackle my own mammoth tbr pile. I started this year by reading Lauren Oliver’s highly praised book Vanishing Girls. It’s pretty un-put-down- vanishing-girls-jacket able, folks.

Nicole (Nick) and her younger sister, Dara, couldn’t really be more unalike. Nick is the responsible one; Dara is the wild child and for as long as Nick can remember, people have been comparing the sisters.

She’s not as pretty as her younger sister…shyer than her younger sister…not as popular as her younger sister.

But despite their differences, Nick and Dara are close. Dara recalls that they’d spent

practically our whole lives sneaking into each other’s rooms to sleep in the same bed, whisper about our crushes, watch moon patterns on the ceiling and try to pick out different shapes…cut our fingers and let them bleed together so we’d be bonded forever, so we’d be made not just of the same genes but of each other.

Parker is Nick’s best friend – the boy from the neighbourhood who has shared every single milestone in Nick’s life. Then he and Dara hook up and things get awkward. Dara goes off the rails – drinking and doing drugs – and then there’s the car accident.

Oliver has written a novel that is both an exciting page-turner (a young girl goes missing and then Dara disappears and Nick is convinced the two disappearances are somehow connected) and a moving family drama. Nick and Dara’s parents have separated and the accidents adds extra emotional weight to the already damaged family.

The narrative unfolds in dual first-person narratives, through diary entries and police reports and photographs and illustrations. Each sister has her own version of the truth of what happened on the night of the accident and the time-shifting narrative will yield important clues to careful readers, but the truth is that when all is revealed, you’ll probably still be scrambling to figure out how Oliver’s pulled it off.

Oliver is well-known in the YA world. She wrote the popular Delirium series and I have been looking forward to reading her adult novel, Rooms. After reading Vanishing Girls I think I’ll have to move Rooms up my reading list. That’s pretty much the highest praise I can give.

Bittersweet – Miranda Beverly-Whittemore

Posted on September 11, 2016 by Christie

18339743 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”.

“…if we don’t get that little hovel in shipshape in less than a week, I won’t inherit it,” Ev tells Mabel on the train to Vermont.

Winloch is a strange out-of-time place comprised of an assortment of cottages and a communal Dining Hall set around a beautiful lake, inhabited by Ev’s immediate family including her parents, Birch and Tilde. It’s isolated and idyllic and Mabel is enchanted. This, she decides, is the life she wants.

Her visit to Birch and Tilde’s cottage only reaffirms her admiration:

Upon the honey-colored floor stood antique wood sideboards and a large mahogany table. An exquisite burgundy Oriental rug tied the furniture together, ending before a large fireplace sporting a brass fender and matching andirons. Canapes were arranged in colorful formations upon hand-painted porcelain platters: crab cakes and mini-lobster rolls and demitasses of chilled pea soup.

Even more impressive, the Winslow’s cottage boasts an impressive Van Gogh, “the most beautiful painting I’d ever seen.”

But there is also something slightly sinister about Winloch. For one thing, Ev installs bolts on the bathroom and bedroom door at Bittersweet. Then Mabel meets Indo, Birch’s sister, who enlists Mabel’s help in locating some important documents lost somewhere in the attic of the Dining Hall, claiming she’d been “looking for a friend like [Mabel] for a while.”

Mabel soon finds herself negotiating a landscape of shifting loyalties and strange tensions. It makes for compelling reading, that’s for sure; I couldn’t turn the pages quickly enough.

Although the bulk of Bittersweet takes place during that one summer, Mabel is actually remembering the events from a vantage point many years later. This will, in part, help explain why Mabel seems older than seventeen. Her own personal history, revealed in tantalizing snippets, will also help the reader understand her motivations. Bittersweet is Shakespearean in its scope.

Highly recommended.

I Let You Go – Clare Mackintosh

Posted on September 3, 2016 by Christie

There have been a lot of books in the suspense thriller vein of late and I love them, especiall let you go y in the summer when I just want to give my brain a break from school. Publishers always want to draw comparisons to Gone Girl, which is the book that perhaps kick-started this newest craze, but I think it’s better to let a book stand on its own bookish merits.

Clare Mackintosh’s novel I Let You Go is definitely top of the thriller heap. I couldn’t put this book down and galloped through it in just a couple of sittings.

In the book’s opening pages, a mother is walking home in the pouring rain with her young son. Just at the road across the street from their home, he lets go of her hand and runs across the street. Out of nowhere, a car comes barreling down the street and hits the boy. From this point on, I Let You Go is a grab-you-by-the-throat suspense thriller that follows Jenna Gray as she goes to the Welsh coast to escape the tragic death and the police detectives, Ray and Kate, who are trying to find the driver behind the wheel.

Jenna’s grief is palpable. “Everything has changed,” she muses. “The instant the car slid across the wet tarmac, my whole life changed.” She stays until she can’t anymore and then, packing only what will fit into her holdall, including a box of treasures from her life, she runs away.

Unable to resist, I open the box and pick up the uppermost photo: a Polaroid taken by a soft-spoken midwife on the day he was born. He is a tiny scrap of pink, barely visible beneath the white hospital blanket.

As a mom, it’s hard to imagine how Jenna will ever survive this tragedy, but survive she must. She finally settles in a tiny tourist town called Penfach, somewhere outside of Swansea. There she rents an isolated, dilapidated cottage and begins the arduous process of overcoming her grief.

In the meantime, Ray and Kate sift through the non-existent evidence, hoping for a break in the case. Mackintosh spent twelve years as a police officer and so these sections are authentic, but don’t weigh the narrative down with unnecessary police jargon. In addition, Ray and Kate – especially Ray – are given interesting personal lives, which add another dimension to the story.

It doesn’t always work, but it does here – Mackintosh pushes the story along and months pass. Jenna starts to make a life for herself; Ray and Kate are taken off the hit and run case because they’ve done all they can do and then all hell breaks loose in a totally WTF fashion. You’ll know what I mean when you get there and from that moment on, it is a breathless race to the book’s conclusion.

LOVED IT!

In a Dark, Dark Wood – Ruth Ware

Posted on August 28, 2016 by Christie

Ruth Ware and I have lived parallel lives. I, too, have worked as a waitress, EAL teacher and bookseller. Okay, I may have never been an official book publicist, but I could argue that I sell books all the time by talking about them here and in my classroom and on the radio. I have not, however, written a much-lauded “instant New York Times bestseller.” Crap.

Leonora (also known as Lee and Nora and Leo) is a reclusive and slightly odd mystery th9H5NVHJN 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.

The invitation to the party starts Nora’s trip down memory lane, but it’s not a journey she takes willingly.

Clare had been my friend. My best friend, for a long time. And yet I’d run, without looking back, without even leaving a number. What kind of friend did that make me?

There’s only one other name Nora recognizes on the invite list: Nina da Souza. Nora reaches out and the two women make an “I’ll go if you go” pact. This is how they end up in the middle of the woods at a house that seems “as if it had been thrown down carelessly by a child tired of playing with some very minimalist bricks.” For someone used to living in close quarters in the middle of a huge city, Nora finds the location of Clare’s hen night “painfully exposed.” There’s a reason the place is called ‘The Glass House.’

The party’s host is Clare’s best friend from university, Flo. The other attendees are Melanie, a new mother and Tom, the token gay friend. When Nina and Nora arrive, Clare is not yet there. The whole event is awkward and fraught with tension.

Ware intersperses the hen night shenanigans with the aftermath of the weekend. Nora wakes up and “everything hurts. The light in my eyes, the pain in my head. There’s a stench of blood in my nostrils, and my hands are sticky with it.” There are police officers outside her hospital room door and someone is dead.

I enjoyed reading In a Dark, Dark Wood, but I sure wish people would stop comparing every psychological thriller/mystery to Gone Girl. This book is nothing like Gone Girl. That’s not a criticism, by the way. Ware doesn’t waste time with verbosity; this book moves along lickity split. Nora is a perfectly serviceable character, although not particularly endearing. There are plenty of creepy moments – as you’d expect in the fishbowl of a location. The book has “blockbuster movie starring Reese Witherspoon (an early fan of the novel)” written all over it.

The Dog Days of Summer

Posted on August 15, 2016 by Christie

Listen Here.

Want to live longer? Apparently all you have to do is read. According to a study that will be published in the Sept issue of the journal Social Science & Medicine “reading doesn’t only help us to tolerate existence, but actually prolongs it,” and that “that people who read books for 30 minutes a day lived longer than those who didn’t read at all.” The study looked at the reading habits of about 3500 people aged 50 and older and discovered that readers lived, on average, two years longer than non-readers.

Of course this is great news for people like me because I read every day – clearly in a bid to prolong my life, but also because I stubbornly refuse to leave this earth until all the books on my tbr shelf have been read. I figure I’m good until at least 140.

So there’s no time like the present to make reading a part of your regular routine – like yoga for the brain. Read the entire article from The Guardian here.

At the start of the summer I talked all about the books that I was going to try to read this summer, including the entire Harry Potter series. Yeah, not so much. I did read The Chamber of Secrets and I am currently reading Prisoner of Azkaban and there is no question of the appeal of these books but I am, for obvious reasons, finding them young. I know that as the characters get older, the themes will get darker and I will read them all as promised…but I am never getting through them all this summer.

I also said I was going to read Martin Short’s memoir I Must Say and I did read that. If you 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.

But of the books I spoke about back at the beginning of July, that’s as far as I got. I got distracted by shiny new books and so I thought I’d offer some suggestions for the dog days of summer.

I’m Thinking of Ending Things – Iain Reid Im+Thinking+of+Ending+Things

So, Reid is a Canadian writer and this is his first book of fiction although he’s written a couple memoirs. This book is a total mind-you-know-what. An unnamed narrator is on her way to meet her boyfriend’s parents. In a snowstorm. As they drive, she catalogues their relationship and contemplates ending things. When they arrive at Jake’s parent’s house – which is in the middle of nowhere – things take a turn for the what-the-hell. It’s compulsively readable and totally strange. If you read this book, I’d love for you to tell me what you think happens.

The Crooked House – Christobel Kent

If you are a fan of the BBC miniseries Broadchurch, this is the book for you. It’s about a girl named Alison who, until she was 14, lived in a small British town called Saltleigh. Her life is irrevocably changed when her entire family, with the exception of her father, is murdered. The police determine that it was her dad that committed the crime. Fast forward several years later and Alison finds herself back in Saltleigh with her boyfriend to attend a wedding. She has no choice but to start to examine the past and try to figure out what really happened. This is a slow burn, but it’s well-written and perfect for a rainy day because it can (and should ) be read in one go.

the-girls-in-the-garden-9781476792217_hr The Girls in the Garden – Lisa Jewell

This book is about a woman who moves to a small community in London after her husband has a psychotic break and burns their house down. Which, would probably be enough fodder for a book on all its own, but that’s not really what the book is about. When the book starts the eldest daughter, soon-to-be-thirteen-year-old Grace, is found bloody and unconscious in the community garden behind the house. Then the book sort of unspools the story of the residents that live around the garden…and the children…and what really happened to Grace. It’s a domestic drama that reads like a thriller.

The Ludic Reader

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