Tag Archives: page turner

Dark Horses – Susan Mihalic

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By page fifteen of Susan Mihalic’s novel Dark Horses, I knew that I was in for a ride – and not just because this is the story of fifteen-year-old equestrian Roan Montgomery. This early into the story I’d learned that Roan is a skilled rider and shares a special bond with her horse, Jasper, that her relationship with her mother is tenuous partly because she’s having an affair with a teacher at Roan’s school, and that her relationship with her father, Monty, is close. And when I say close I mean he enters the bathroom while Roan is in the tub and kisses her, “his mouth gentle and persuasive.”

Roan only cares about riding and her life revolves around training. Her father was an Olympic medal winner and now trains Roan. She goes to school because she has to, but what she really wants is to do well at competitions so that she can earn a spot on an Olympic team.

Roan’s life is pretty insular. Although their farm, Rosemount, employs a handful and people, including Gertrude and Eddie who have been there since before Roan was born, Roan is isolated. She doesn’t have friends or a cell phone; her life is strictly controlled by her father. That is until she starts getting to know Will Howard, a guy at school.

Her friendship with Will amps up the tension between Roan and Monty because she has to keep Will a secret. And she has to keep the sexual relationship with her father a secret from Will. Mihalic does an interesting thing with the incestuous relationship. Roan is trapped by her complicated feelings for her father: she loves him and she loathes him, sometimes at the same time. She acknowledges how confusing it is that “I didn’t fight or scream, […] my body responded to his, the ease with which he made me come–the fact that I came at all.” She has spent a long time compartmentalizing all these feelings. She admires her father’s coaching abilities. But she is becoming increasingly uncomfortable with the sexual relationship. There’s no saying no to Monty.

There’s nobody reading this book who is going to think what Monty is doing to Roan is anything but abuse, but Roan is only coming to that realization as her feelings for Will grow. When Monty realizes that Will is a real threat to this prison he has kept Roan in, he tightens the noose. Then there is no question that he is raping his daughter. It’s devastating.

It’s not right to say that I “enjoyed” this book, although I did fly through it, wholly invested in Roan’s story. If I have one complaint it’s that I hated the way the book ended. Well, maybe ‘hate’ is too strong a word. Something big had to happen, for sure, and something big does happen. For me, it just wasn’t big enough. I hated Monty Montgomery and he just didn’t suffer enough.

Dark Horses is an unflinching look at sexual abuse and what it means to be a survivor. It’s graphic and certainly has the potential to be triggering, but I thought it was a compelling read.

The Four – Ellie Keel

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Donna Tartt’s 1992 novel The Secret History is the dark academia novel all others aspire to be. This is a sub-genre of fiction that I really love, so I am drawn to books that feature isolated campuses, academics, and shifting loyalties. Ellie Keel’s debut The Four definitely scratched the itch.

Rose Lawson is one of four scholarship students admitted to the prestigious High Realms school. Telling the story of her time at the school from some years in the future, Rose paints a picture of extreme privilege and cruelty. She is saved from total desolation due to her friendship with the other scholarship students, Lloyd and Sami and her roommate Marta.

The novel opens with Rose’s admission that

It would have made our lives a lot easier if Marta had simply pushed Genevieve out of our bedroom window on our third day at High Realms. Certainly, it would have been tragic. […] She would have died instantly.

Genevieve Locke is a member of the Senior Patrol (aka a prefect), a member of the hockey team (field hockey as the story takes place in England) and she treats Marta and Rose with “lofty derision”. The truth is most of the students the four friends encounter at school are cruel and horrible, but all of the scholarship students count themselves lucky to have been chosen to attend.

Then something horrible happens and three of the friends find themselves desperately working together to protect the fourth member of their group. The Four has all the things I love in a book like this: secrets, unreliable narrators, a labyrinthine school, and surprising twists and turns that will keep you guessing until the very end. Keel is an award-winning theatre producer, but she is also a gifted writer and I will definitely be watching to see what she writes next.

Nightwatching – Tracy Sierra

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When you read as many thrillers as I do, it’s hard to be not to feel as though you’ve read it already. Tracy Sierra’s debut Nightwatching definitely offers a few surprises for discerning readers.

Our unnamed narrator wakes up in the middle of the night to the realization that “There was someone in the house.”

It’s a terrifying notion because she is alone with her two young children and a snowstorm is raging outside. When she steps out of her room to investigate, she sees him at the end of the hall.

He was tall. His arms hung loose and long. His presence had the distantly familiar rancidness of something wrong and rotten she’d tasted before but couldn’t quite place.

All this woman knows is that she needs to keep her children safe. And thus begins a very long night of cat and mouse. The woman knows something about the house that she is quite certain the intruder does not know, and that’s the existence of a secret room. But even that will not guarantee long-term safety, so there are hard decisions to be made.

As they hide, the woman mulls over the details of her marriage, past trauma, and her acrimonious relationship with her father-in-law. These sections were perhaps not as exciting as other parts of the book. This book also has some interesting things to say about trauma and whether or not women are believed. I don’t want to say too much about that, but I have to admit to feeling like I was being gaslit. Is the woman a reliable narrator? Could I trust what I was being told?

While some parts of the book were a tad slow, there were lots of moments when the pages turned themselves and, at the end of the day, I felt like the book really delivered on its promise. Sierra is definitely a writer to keep your eye on.

The Favorites – Layne Fargo

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In 1998, Canadian ice dancers Shae-Lynn Bourne and Victor Kraatz competed in the Nagano Olympics, finishing just off the podium in fourth place. I was wholly invested in them at the time; they were innovative and fun to watch.

Flash forward to 2018 and Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir at the PyeongChang Olympics, where they capped off a long career with another Olympic gold. Even people who didn’t know anything about the sport rooted for this Canadian pair, and if you want to see why – just watch the video. It’s also interesting to watch the two videos back to back to see how far the sport has come.

So, that brings me to Layne Fargo’s novel The Favorites, a novel which drops the reader into the competitive, cutthroat world of competitive ice dancing. I have seen this book all over the place and so I bought it and read it and it was a ride.

Katarina “Kat” Shaw has only ever wanted one thing in her life – to be like two-time Olympian Sheila Lin. Well, she wants one other thing, actually: Heath Rocha. Kat and Heath have known each other since they were kids, when Heath, a foster child, came to live with the Shaws.

When the novel opens, they are sixteen and just about to head off to the National Championships. Kat’s parents are dead and she’s been left in the care of her older brother, Lee. I use the word ‘care’ loosely because Lee only really cares about getting high.

Anyway, Kat is a talented skater and Heath is a good partner because he won’t get in the way of what she really wants – which is to skate in the Olympics. The problem is they live in Illinois, have no money and little access to professional coaching, meaning that they don’t have the support necessary to make it all the way to the top. But then, they meet Sheila Lin and that changes the trajectory of their whole lives.

The Favorites draws some of its inspiration from Wuthering Heights, a novel I read a million years ago but which I credit for kick starting my love of stories featuring characters who shouldn’t necessarily be together but desperately belong together. I mean, I am not sure Kat and Heath deserve to be in the same company as Catherine and Heathcliff, but this book wants you to believe they do.

Look, I’m going to be straight up. I devoured this book. I couldn’t wait to come home and pick it back up at the end of the day. It’s an unapologetic soap opera covering many, many years and many, many skating competitions. Part of the narrative takes the form of clips from people talking about Kat and Heath and some of the events that happened to them as they chase their Olympic dream a la Daisy Jones and the Six; the rest of the book is Kat’s first person narration.

Objectively, it’s not a great book, in the sense that it’s not great literature. I felt like I was being told things to get me from one moment to the next and I never really felt the great passion between the two main characters because their love story was PG13, even as adults. The characters got older, but they didn’t act any different really. The book reads very YA, although it’s not. There’s lots of backstabbing and crying and miscommunication and gossip. The whole thing wraps up pretty tidily. It’s not unsatisfying, it’s just neat.

We stared at each other in the shadows, so close we were sharing breath. Later, we’d become world famous for that: stretching out the moment before a kiss until it was almost unbearable, until every member of the audience felt the quickening of our pulses, the pure want reflected in our eyes.

But that was choreography. This was real.

I might not have believed it by the end, but I skated along with them quite happily until their final bow. If there’s a limited series coming, I’m all in.

The Devil Crept In – Ania Ahlborn

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If Ania Ahlborn’s novel The Devil Crept In had been the first book I’d read by her, I am not 100% positive that I would be adding her backlist to my TBR, but it was not. My first encounter with this author was her novel Brother and that book was both creepy and emotionally devastating and made my top books of the year list, pretty close to the top. This novels suffers only by comparison because The Devil Crept In is an objectively creepy book.

Ten-year-old Stevie lives with his deadbeat teenager bother, Duncan, his mother and his bully of a stepfather. Stevie has some weird ticks; his words jumble up in his head and come out sounding like nursery rhymes. And sometimes he’s prone to an overactive imagination, like that time he hallucinated and stuck his hand in the garbage disposal, losing a couple fingertips in the process.

Stevie’s best friend (and cousin) Jude, 12, lives next door. They are each other’s only friends and even though Jude is a bit of a hell raiser, was “tough [and] unforgiving”, Stevie worships him. Then one day, Jude vanishes.

Jude Brighton was gone, like he’d never existed; vanished as though he and Stevie hadn’t spent their entire lives stomping the pavement of Main Street and living the summer in those woods. To them, the ferns were landmarks. Each bend in Cedar Creek, a compass. If someone had chased Jude through those trees, he would have outrun them. If they had dragged him deep into the wilderness, he would have broken free.

But then, one day, Jude reappears. He doesn’t remember where he’s been and although the adults are certainly glad to see him, Stevie’s concern soon turns to dread because Jude is “Like a corpse brought back from the dead.”

There is another narrative thread in this novel and that belongs to Rosie Aleksander. I wasn’t quite as invested in this part of the novel because it felt like exposition — although it is necessary to the whole plot.

The action really ramps up in the last third of the book and I read until the wee hours (on a school night, no less) so that I could see how it would all wrap up. One thing I have admired about Ahlborn is her willingness to draw the reader down a dark path without the promise of a happy ending.

The Devil Crept In is a solid read.

The Drift – C.J. Tudor

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Although I am posting this review on Jan 9, 2025, C.J. Tudor’s (The Chalk Man, The Hiding Place) novel The Drift was actually my last read of 2024. I finished it up poolside while on a family vacation in Florida. It’s a cheat that it’s ending up in my book count for 2025, but who cares?

Told from three different perspectives, The Drift is a dystopian horror novel that concerns three different groups of people, all of whom seem to be stranded.

There’s Hannah, a medical student who had been on her way to the Retreat, when the bus she was on crashed. That’s not all. “Snowstorm outside, coach tipped over and half buried in a drift.” And Hannah figures abut half the passengers are dead.

Meg wakes up in a cable car suspended a thousand feet in the air. She’s not alone, but nobody can really remember how they got into this situation. Worse, no one is really sure how they’re going to get out of it. It’s a blizzard out there.

Finally, there’s Carter, one of a group pf people holed up at The Retreat.

…the Retreat was large. And luxurious. The living room was all polished wooden floors, thick shaggy rugs and worn leather sofas. There was a massive flatscreen TV and DVD player, games consoles and a stereo. A wooden sideboard housed stacks of CDs, dog-eared novels and a collection of board games. The kitchen was modern and sleek with a huge American fridge freezer and a polished granite island.

Residents at the Retreat were well looked after.

What these three groups of people (and our narrators) have in common is part of the fun of this locked room, puzzle box of a novel. There’s a mysterious virus (C.J. Tudor came up with the idea in 2019, just before Covid slammed its way into our lives), a creepy group of people called Whistlers, some gross body horror and lots of wondering who can be trusted. The voices of the three characters aren’t necessarily distinct, but the pages will practically turn themselves as you try to figure just how everything fits together.

The Woman in Cabin 10 – Ruth Ware

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I just wanted something quick and mindless to read and Ruth Ware’s novel The Woman in Cabin 10 ticked the boxes. Kinda sorta.

Travel writer Laura “Lo’ Blacklock is about to go on a five-day cruise, the inaugural voyage of the Aurora, a “boutique super-luxury cruise liner traveling around the Norwegian fjords” and nothing is going to stop her, not even the fact that she recently woke up in the middle of the night to discover a strange man in her flat.

Lo is certain that she can parlay this experience into a promotion at Velocity, the magazine she writes for. At the very least, she might be in line to take over as editor when hers goes out on maternity leave.

As is often the case with first-person narration, Lo isn’t very reliable. For one thing, she drinks a lot. For another, she takes anxiety medication. And she’s already sleep deprived when she boards, due to the aforementioned home invasion. Still, she is determined to make the most of this opportunity, until the woman in the cabin next door to hers (there are only ten on this ship) goes missing. Lo had only met her briefly when she knocks on her door on day one to borrow mascara. (Who would ask to borrow a stranger’s mascara? Yikes.)

Anyway, after a dinner with far too much alcohol, Lo is woken from a dead sleep.

I don’t know what woke me up – only that I shot into consciousness as if someone had stabbed me in the heart with a syringe of adrenaline. I lay there rigid with fear, my heart thumping at about two hundred beats per minute…

What she thinks she witnesses is someone being thrown overboard; what she thinks she sees is blood on the glass partition that separates her balcony from the balcony of the woman next door. When she relates her story to the ship’s head of security, though, he assures her that no one is staying in cabin ten. For the next 150 pages or so, Lo tries to figure out what she actually saw and who this woman is.

The Woman in Cabin Ten is a locked room mystery that takes way too long to get where it’s going, but it’s easy to read and if you don’t read a ton of this type of story, you’ll probably find it fun.

Look for it on Netflix in the coming months.

Talking at Night – Claire Daverley

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If I had read Claire Daverley’s debut Talking at Night a little bit earlier, it would have most certainly made my list of the top twenty books I read this year because I LOVED it! I am always talking about how straight-up romances just don’t float my boat, how I need a little pain with my pleasure. This book delivered and then some.

Rosie and Will meet at a bonfire when she is seventeen and he a little older. Although they go to the same school and share some friends, and Will tutors Rosie’s twin, Josh, in further maths (advanced A level math), these two don’t really know each other until Will suddenly finds himself telling Rosie things he’s never said to anyone.

Will and Rosie could not be more different. Will is “detached and standoffish, despite his popularity and a long list of girlfriends.” Rosie is “a virgin, and she is vanilla.” She also suffers from OCD and is far less outgoing than Josh. It is clear, though, that these two are drawn to each other in ways that neither of them quite understand.

When Rosie tries to pre-emptively end things (because things haven’t really even begun, although they both understand that there is something between them), Will tells her that he thinks about her “On my bike. And in the garage. And when I’m cooking, and running, and trying to sleep.” This is new territory for Will.

Watching these two navigate these feelings over the years – because the novel does span decades – is truly a thing of beauty. There are lots of obstacles preventing them from having the HEA that I wanted for them, but that’s the bit I like best. Where’s the story if they meet, fall in love and suddenly have everything they didn’t even know they wanted?

Will has demons and a past. Rosie has a complicated relationship with her mother and subverts her own desires to make others happy. Tragedy looms around the corner which further complicates things. Rosie goes off to university, but Will stays home in Norfolk. And through it all – Will and Rosie pine and hell yes! so did I.

I loved these two characters. I loved the secondary characters. I loved the unexpected bonds that are forged. I loved the way this book is written. I read it in two sittings, turning the last page way past my bedtime.

If I had my Top Twenty list to do over again, this one would definitely be in the Top 3! Although perhaps not objectively the best book ever…it hit all my sweet spots and so it’s 100% a winner in my book, and that’s the beautiful thing about reading – my opinion is the only one that counts.

Adelaide – Genevieve Wheeler

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Adelaide Williams is drunk when she first meets Rory Hughes.

Late that afternoon, tipsy and tanned, she saw him.

He was wearing a scarf and a blue button-down and Adelaide loved him instantly – all brown curls and razor-sharp jawline. Like a young Colin Firth.

She is compelled to waltz right up to him and tell him that he looks “like a Disney prince.“

Nothing comes of that meet cute, but several months later Rory and Adelaide match on a dating app, something she has been using for casual hook ups. She figures that this night will be no different from the string of other nights she’s recently had. It turns out though that meeting Rory again upends her world.

Genevieve Wheeler’s debut Adelaide tracks the titular character’s time in London where she is first finishing her Master’s and then working. Their first date and first kiss lights a fire inside Adelaide and “in her memory, standing on that street corner, the sky was bright. Birds chirping, clouds parted, sun shining. It’s painfully clichéd, but darkness didn’t exist here, not in this little universe Adelaide entered when she first kissed Rory Hughes.”

At twenty-six, Adelaide is navigating young adulthood. She has her roomies, Celeste and Madison, and her stateside best friend, Eloise. Rory, perfect Rory, is – she is sure – her soul mate. Except, you know, he’s not. He’s got a lot of baggage and it turns out he’s not the best boyfriend. It’s one of those “all that glitters is not gold” situations; when he’s with her, it’s impossible not to feel the heady thrall, but he often disappears or breaks plans; he’s emotionally unavailable.

I am not 26, but I sure understood Adelaide. Her relationship with Rory mimicked many of my own twenty-something relationships which required a lot of work on my behalf, a lot of subjugating my own feelings in service to others, mostly because I was always choosing the wrong others. Adelaide’s fumbling wasn’t frustrating to me; it was relatable.

This is a book about loving someone else fiercely, but ultimately learning that the person most deserving of that sort of care and attention is actually yourself.

Loved it.

Every Single Lie – Rachel Vincent

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Beckett Bergen’s life is about to get a whole lot more complicated -and it was pretty complicated to begin with. For starters, she just dumped her boyfriend, super-hot-star-baseball player, Jake, because she’s convinced that he’s cheating on her. He insists it’s not true, but there’s definitely something he is not telling her.

Then there’s her complicated home life. Her mom, Julie, is a detective on the teensy police force in their small Tennessee town, and she’s barely at home – meaning that Beckett and her older brother, Penn, are responsible for looking out for their younger sister, Landry, 13. Beckett’s dad died several months ago, and it turns out there’s lots Beckett and her siblings don’t know about the circumstances of his death.

But Rachel Vincent’s YA novel Every Single Lie really kicks off when Beckett makes a shocking discovery in the locker room at her school.

There’s something sticking up out of the open duffel. I step closer, then I stumble to a shocked halt.

It’s a hand. A tiny, tiny little red hand.

And it isn’t moving

This discovery sends shock waves through Beckett’s small town and without really quite knowing how, she finds herself at the center of a lot of attention. Rumours start spreading like wildfire – many of which are spread by an anonymous Twitter account, Crimson Cryer, which asserts that perhaps Beckett is more closely linked to this baby than just being the person who discovers the body.

I really liked Beckett and her tenacity. She is determined to find out who this baby belongs to, even though the rumour mill is making it very difficult, and potentially dangerous, for her to do so. There are lots of clues which lead her to some very surprising places, but this book is more than just a solid page-turning mystery. This is also a book about grief, secrets and the damage social media can do.