Book Review | Our House by Louise Candlish

Trinity Avenue is your typical suburban, leafy London street. Well, typical in the sense that the houses are worth several millions of pounds – one of the most coveted postcodes in the area. Properties on this street are gold dust; once you have one, you hang onto it –for better or worse.

So when Fi returns home one January afternoon from a romantic getaway with her new boyfriend, only to find what looks like removal men outside her front door, she thinks that there must have been some terrible mistake.

Only she’s not mistaken. A young woman is standing in the kitchen, directing the movers, equally as befuddled. She and her husband have been coveting one of these houses for an age, and now it’s signed, sealed and delivered. The contracts were exchanged that morning. And Fi’s estranged husband Bram is nowhere to be found.

‘If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster / And treat those two imposters just the same … you’ll be a man, my son!’

We learned that at school.

They didn’t tell us that the worst disasters would be those of our own making.

This is a chilling domestic noir – perceptive, sharp and unsettling. The bounds of credibility are stretched taut – but Candlish never oversteps the mark. Even when the premise seems ridiculous, the story that unravels takes us deep down a rabbit warren of deceit, desperation and dark depths of despair in such a way that makes the whole tale real and believable. The story is divided into three narrative threads; Fi, telling her story on a radio show called The Victim, Bram’s Word Doc version of events, and an omniscient narrator tying together the spaces in between. These voices work in tandem to construct the events that lead to that fateful afternoon in January. But with two unreliable narrators, who can we trust? Our memories are so imperfect. Not to mention, there are things we would rather conceal – even from ourselves.

What is extraordinary is just how ordinary everyone is; regular people living regular lives. There are no serial killers lurking in dark spaces, no kidnappers ready to snatch away your little ones. Real fear comes from not knowing the people closest to you, having no idea what they are capable of. And whilst this novel felt a little bit convoluted at times, it nevertheless kept me guessing – right up until the last page. When I read that last line, I had shivers all up and down my spine.

I voluntarily read this copy provided by NetGalley. Our House will be published on August 7th 2018.

Read if you enjoyed: The Lying Game by Ruth Ware, Dear Amy by Helen Callaghan 

Book Review | Our Kind of Cruelty by Araminta Hall

Mike loves Verity – V – more than anything. Since they met at university, they’ve been inseparable, and Mike can’t imagine life without her. Their relationship isn’t, perhaps, what you’d call conventional – one of their favourite pastimes is a game they play, called the Crave. A game involving manipulating strangers in order to scare them – and they love the rush, the turn-on, the feeling of power.

But Mike’s love for V gets a little bit too intense. He moves to New York on a temporary work contract, and things start to fall apart – from her perspective, in any case. When he comes back at Christmas, the relationship crumbles, and life as Mike knows it is over.

It can’t be, though – right? This is him and V. They are soulmates, destined to be together. He sets about making his beautiful Clapham house just the way V would have wanted it – an edenic English garden, bursting with flowers, to take the place of grey concrete and stone. Even when he gets an invitation to her wedding, he can’t believe it’s really over. It’s all part of the game, see. All part of the Crave.

This psychological thriller gripped me from the start. It’s a perverse love story, told from Mike’s perspective as he awaits trial – for what, we’re not yet sure. He writes it all down, reflecting back on the events that led up to that moment; how it all transpired. We learn about his troubled childhood and trauma at the hands of a neglectful mother; his lack of friends; his obvious delusions. You can’t help but pity him, even as you feel sickened by his behaviour.

‘I could look at V when she came in from wherever she’d been and know instantly how she was feeling. Every time she rang I knew it was her without looking at the screen. When we watched a film or listened to music I knew what her reaction would be without speaking. I knew how to make her scream and moan and thrash, every inch of her body mapped indelibly on my mind. Connections like that cannot be broken, however much we are separated.’

All the while, I kept expecting this novel to turn out differently from the way it did. I kept thinking I had it figured out, but I didn’t. Mike refuses to believe what V has told him, time and time again – that it’s over between them, that she’s moved on, that she loves someone else.

In the end, though, we get it. We get what Hall has been trying to tell us all along. This isn’t about some big twist, some jaw-dropping turn of events ­– the truth has been right under our noses this whole time. Whilst not what I was expecting, this is nevertheless a gripping, twisted tale, one that makes you think long after it’s over.

I received a copy of this title through Netgalley. Our Kind of Cruelty will be published on 8^th May 2018.

Book Review | Small Great Things by Jodi Picoult

It’s the same as any other hectic night on the labor and delivery ward in a Connecticut hospital. But for experienced nurse Ruth Jefferson, it’s a night that she’ll never forget. Used to seeing patients from all walks of life, Ruth knows that the most important thing is for mothers to deliver safely with healthy babies. But mistakes happen.

The problem is, what happens when the mistake involves the baby of a white supremacist, and you’re an African-American?

Before Ruth knows what is happening, things begin to spiral out of control and the careful, quiet life she’d established for herself and her son begins to fall apart at the seams. Having spent a lifetime trying to keep under the radar – working hard, being successful, having a stable income – she now finds herself on trial, in a case where race is the elephant in the room. Glaringly obvious but forcibly unspoken.

“Any public defender who tells you justice is blind is telling you a big fat lie.”

The story is told from the point of view of Ruth, her public defender Kennedy, and the white supremacist Turk. It does not make for comfortable reading. We hear of Ruth’s daily microaggressions; despite being a respected professional, she’s followed around in supermarkets, patronised over her son doing well in a good school, assumed to be the student when the other person in the room is a white man. Kennedy, a well-meaning white woman who ‘doesn’t see race’ is forced to confront her prejudices head-on – when it finally becomes clear that the courtroom conversation cannot ignore race any longer. And Turk, the most terrifying of all – telling us about unshakable belief in the superiority of the ‘white race’, his horrifying attacks on those he believes to be less than human, the swastika tattoo on his skull. It’s deeply uncomfortable. But that’s the point.

“When you say race doesn’t matter all I hear is you dismissing what I’ve felt, what I’ve lived, what’ it’s like to be put down because of the colour of my skin.”

Given the landscape of race relations in America, there’s never been a more pertinent time to have this conversation. Picoult’s latest book is a testament to these troubled and frightening times. There’s been much made of her writing as a black woman, a lived experience she couldn’t possibly understand. Where are the shelves of bestselling books about women of colour written by women of colour? That said, a privileged white woman using her work to open up these discussions about race and justice – is at least using her platform for good.

“What if the puzzle of the world was a shape you didn’t fit into? And the only way to survive was to mutilate yourself, carve away your corners, sand yourself down, modify yourself to fit? How come we haven’t been able to change the puzzle instead?”

Picoult doesn’t shy away from thorny, polemical issues. It’s a difficult read in terms of content, alleviated by Picoult’s natural storytelling capacities, developed characters and pacy plot. It is undeniably heavy-handed and melodramatic at times, and falls back on clichés and conveniences to hammer home the message. It ticks all the boxes for a textbook Picoult novel, but what is also does is open up difficult conversations, challenges assumptions of the well-meaning but ignorant, and crafts a story that resonates and forces the reader to reflect on the state of contemporary society.

 

 

Book Review | I Know Where She Is by S. B. Caves

All it takes is a split second with your eye off of the ball. That moment is all it takes for your whole life to be ripped apart at the seams. This is the kind of hell Francine is all too familiar with – knowing that had she been more vigilant in that moment, her young daughter Autumn would still be with her.

It’s been ten years since Autumn vanished without a trace, and Francine is a wreck. She’s clinging on to semblances of normality, managing to hold down a job alongside an alcohol addiction, but has been driven to the point of madness over the past decade, engaging in increasingly desperate attempts to locate her missing daughter.

So when an anonymous letter turns up through her door, containing nothing but the words ‘I know where she is’, it wouldn’t be a stretch to imagine that this is a cruel joke played on a desperate woman, or that in her fragile state of mind, the whole thing is an illusion. She pleads with her ex – Autumn’s father – to believe her, but his derision is palpable. So she goes at it alone.

Then a girl shows up out the blue – covered in cuts, severely malnourished and caked in dirt. She claims that she helped take Autumn all those years ago – and knows where she is…

It is at this stage that Francine falls down a rabbit-hole of horrors. This novel needs to come with a very big trigger warning for graphic depiction of torture, rape, sexual violence. The kinds of unimaginable trauma that Francine hears about is the very real peril that a thriller like this needs to keep the plot moving swiftly on – and there’s no denying that this is a gripping, intense read.

It is also an uncomfortable read, and there were times I thought about stopping. But the pace ramps up a notch every time, making it difficult to put down. It’s wildly implausible on several counts – but the frenzied, half-mad schemes of Francine illustrate well her total desperation, and the lengths she will go to to save her daughter.

“The hard work was already done, the difficult choices made. There was no going back now, she realised. It was all or nothing. Find Autumn or die trying.”

I received a copy of this book via Netgalley. It will be published on 14th August 2017.

 

 

Cousins by Salley Vickers

‘We most of us secretly desire, I suspect, to return to the conditions of childhood, where there are plenty of questions about life but not, on the whole, questions about how to live. It’s the questions about how to live that are so flummoxing.’

‘Cousins’ is told through the voices of three generations of Tye women, their narrative spanning from the Second World War to the present. There’s the young and innocent bookworm Hetta, in awe of her older brother Will and cousin Cecelia; the free-spirited Bell, mother to Cecelia who’s never been much good at it; and Betsy, their kindhearted and perceptive Grandmother.

At the centre of their gravity is Will Tye, charismatic but headstrong, prone to outbursts of anger yet fiercely loyal. Hetta is devoted to her older brother, thrilled when she is permitted to play with him and their cousin Cecelia, whom everyone knows as Cele. We steadily learn that the closeness between Cele and Will is not platonic; in their mid-teens, the two become lovers – a clandestine relationship that is never treated as such, never depicted as a transgression. After all, their Grandparents are first cousins and have lived a long and largely happy life together.

It’s clear from the start that something horrendous will befall Will – the narrative opens with Hetta and her parents receiving a phone call, rushing off to Cambridge in the middle of the night. What has happened – and why – becomes clear, but the narrative hands us small slices of truth at a time. These fragments are steadily pieced together throughout the novel, each woman offering up their versions of history.

Some parts of the narrative are beautiful; the characters vividly drawn – with all their quirks and foibles, all their failings – they are depicted as human. I loved the depiction of the eccentric Grandpa, a staunch communist, a conscientious objector during the war who obsessed with translating the Aeneid and imparting his political and social convictions onto his future generations. Cecelia – a character who we only ever experience second hand – is portrayed as beautiful, enigmatic, fragile, yet in other ways, strong. The depictions of her suffering with mental illness and obsessive compulsive disorder are well-written, her intense loyalty to Will and the vulnerability this entails is moving. Keeping her voice removed from the tale preserves her impenetrability – she’s a character we want to know more of, yet are denied the chance to hear her own version of events – beyond that of fragments in letters and diaries.

The weaving in and out of different moments in time was largely well-executed, and added depth and dimension to what is almost an epic family tale.

Where the story disappoints is that it doesn’t quite achieve the status of an epic family tale. Too much that happens seems extraneous, the three women trying to recall a vast depth of family history, much of which is never touched upon again – characters that pop up without much purpose only to disappear again, long-winded recollections of events that bear little relation anything else. Whereas the characterisation was largely strong, I found it hard to like Will – very little of what we’re shown redeems him as a character, and because we know of his accident right from the start, it doesn’t pack as big a punch as it could have done when we find out the circumstances behind it all. It was hard to feel attached to him at all, or to care what his eventual fate would be. Subsequently, it was hard to really understand the affect he had on everyone around him.

The ripple effects of history is a strong theme throughout the narrative – a concept that, in theory, is a brilliant one. After all, blood is blood – and those ties are thicker than water. It’s fascinating how certain circumstances mirror themselves throughout generations, how certain characteristics and patterns of behaviour are passed down over time. The problem with it in this book was that it felt a bit too contrived, all too convenient. In a book where a lot of the characters felt very authentic, some of the events that unfolded were just too implausible.

There are undoubtedly great things about this book; I would say it is strong on characterisation, lacking in a coherent plot. Nevertheless, there are some lovely passages – and in light of my frustrations about the lack of overall coherency within the narrative, this is perhaps a pertinent one.

‘Theo, when he speaks of music, speaks often of silence. He is in love, he says, with gaps, with the speaking spaces in a musical score. It’s a subject where our interests meet because I am fascinated by the gaps made by people and by the gaps in people, and how these gaps get filled, sometimes to our detriment … So much of this story has to do with gaps. I hope I see them more clearly now.’

[I received a copy of this book from Netgalley in return for an honest review.]