Jewell offers an intriguing premise and characters but has difficulty maintaining plot momentum and creating depth of...
Mysterious, life-threatening injuries to a teenage girl cause previously close-knit neighborhood families to examine each other with concern and suspicion.
Displaced after their father’s psychotic break, during which he burned down their house, young teenagers Pip and Grace move with their mother, Clare, to a London community steeped in multigenerational family drama stemming from the unexplained death of a 15-year-old girl in the communal garden years earlier. Pip’s deep longing for her absent father and concern about her sister’s new friends—the other teenagers in the community—are conveyed through letters to her father. This teenage narrative perspective is balanced with those of Adele, a neighborhood mother who home-schools her three teenage daughters, and, to a lesser extent, Clare as she considers whether to reconnect with her husband upon his release from the hospital. The novel is split into sections: the opening features Pip finding a violently injured and unconscious Grace in the park following a community party, and the following sections explore the complex adult and teenage relationships both leading up to the attack and following it. Although Grace survives, the community is reminded of the unsolved death of a teenage girl who was related to or known by many of the adults in the neighborhood, which makes them question how well they know each other or their children’s friends. While Jewell creates a story ripe with anticipation and emotion, she ultimately fails to develop a climax that would bring together the several dramatic tropes at work (a mentally unstable father who believes he hears rodents in the walls; the tensions between teenage girls, especially when it comes to friendships and dating). The reader is left trying to reconcile the adult characters’ actions with the insufficient explanations of their motivations.
Jewell offers an intriguing premise and characters but has difficulty maintaining plot momentum and creating depth of character.Pub Date: June 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4767-9221-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2016
A thriller that fails when it turns to the supernatural.
A Harvard freshman investigates the suicide of her schizophrenic brother and finds herself chasing a conspiracy and hearing the voices of the dead.
Cady Archer is determined to attend Harvard even though her beloved older brother, Eric, killed himself there. Considered a genius in math and science, Eric suffered from schizophrenia but had stopped taking his prescriptions, and his yearlong mental health spiral into paranoia and delusion still haunts Cady and her parents. Cady is attending Harvard against her mother’s wishes, but she’s driven by a need to understand what happened the night Eric died. Her quest leads her to a handsome, seductive friend of Eric’s, the professor with whom he was working on a secret project, and something more troubling: voices in her head. Is Cady suffering from schizophrenia, too? Or are the voices she’s hearing truly ghosts, real people who once lived on the Harvard campus and faced their own dilemmas there? The question of Cady’s mental health is interesting, and Serritella—best known for the essay collections she writes with her mother, thriller writer Lisa Scottoline (I See Life Through Rosé-Colored Glasses, 2018, etc.)—brings the famous campus to life in a vivid way. She also effectively explores the aftermath of loss and grief on a family. But Serritella is on shaky ground once the story veers into the supernatural. Cady’s conversations with the ghosts are tiresome and ultimately don’t add much to the narrative. In fact, they detract from what could have been a solid psychological thriller. Her conversations with Bilhah, a slave who is terrified her son will be sold away from her, feel uncomfortably like pandering. The book is repetitive and far too long, and though the endgame strives to shock readers with twists, it's ultimately unsatisfying.
A thriller that fails when it turns to the supernatural.Pub Date: May 5, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-525-51036-9
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Lots of frenzied flipping back and forth for readers who like to figure out the puzzle.
Witnessing a suicide proves almost fatal for the witness herself.
Shay Miller would not have been on that subway platform had she not taken the 22 seconds required to tie up her ponytail. Because she did, she is the sole witness to a suicide that changes her life. But is she stalking the friends of the dead girl, or are they stalking her? It seems to be both, as Hendricks and Pekkanen (An Anonymous Girl, 2019) unfold another one of their intricately plotted, female-focused thrillers. Rage about rape and sexual abuse underlies the plot as Google searches, dating apps, and hacked phones move it forward, making this a thriller of the moment. Here, the evil men are on the sidelines—the women are pitted against each other in a complicated game of cat and mouse. Shay, who is lonely, insecure, and broke, is easily drawn in by the cool and confident Moore sisters, who ply her with beauty makeovers, a “sea-blue leather purse,” “a sugar cookie scented Nest candle, with notes of Tahitian vanilla and bourbon infused caramel,” and, most devastatingly, the illusion of friendship. But socially awkward, highly observant Shay, who makes her way through life by recording statistics and factoids about human nature in a “Data Book,” can only be fooled so long. “Between 73 and 79 percent of homicides during a 15-year period were committed by offenders known to the victim,” she notes. Good thing to know. The authors dole out clues in a series of interlocking flashbacks; finally we get the detail that makes the pieces come together, with just a few little issues to argue about in your book club.
Lots of frenzied flipping back and forth for readers who like to figure out the puzzle.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-20203-1
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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