Month: September 2020

‘Heart Bones’ – Colleen Hoover

Hearts don’t have bones so they can’t hurt…proving people who think this wrong is, I think, the reason for writers like Hoover, who seem determined to show us the many ways in which loving someone can both heal and hurt in equal measure.

Our main character in this is Beyah Grim. When we first met her she’s living in a trailer park with her mother, a meth addict, and is faced with the pretty unpleasant scene of her mother having overdosed in their living space. Seeing how badly Beyah’s home life has impacted on her is made startlingly clear when she says that dying was probably the one good thing her mother did for her. Only hours after this shocking discovery, Beyah is told she is being evicted from the only home she’s known because her mother didn’t pay rent for the last few months. Her only choice is to phone the father she doesn’t really know.

So Beyah finds herself on a plane headed for Texas, where she is going to stay until she can take up her place in college. As soon as she meets her father at the airport it’s clear that her mother’s addiction has robbed her of the chance to have a relationship with her father, and though he has to take some blame for not pushing for a relationship it’s hard not to feel sorry for people like this who fall through the cracks.

Spending the summer surrounded by money and opportunities is a tough thing for Beyah to accept. She is the proverbial fish out of water, and resists her stepsister Sara’s attempts to fix her up with a friend. What we quickly come to realise is that Beyah has already made quite an impression on this friend…and so starts a summer fling that we predict will end in tears – but I definitely didn’t predict just how emotionally I’d react to it.

This is probably a book that’s good to go into without knowing too much. I feared it would be bleak and yet found myself laughing and enjoying this far more than I predicted. Of course it has moments that will upset you, but at its heart it’s a story about having the courage to stick with those you trust.

‘The Search Party’ – Simon Lelic

I love it when a book surprises you with something that you just don’t see coming…

In The Search Party we have, essentially, a mystery to solve. But, as one of the detectives in the book says, there’s more than one thing going on and Simon Lelic definitely keeps us guessing on more than one occasion.

What we know at the start is that a young girl, Sadie, has gone missing. Many people in the town assume her boyfriend killed her while others think she’s run away. The police have found her bag near the local river but no sign of a body. The pressure is on. Bizarrely, Sadie’s friends decided to head out into the local woodland to search for Sadie and it would seem another of their group has been killed. It seems someone has something to hide, and Detective Fleet – who has his own history with the town – is under pressure to work out what happened.

Cutting between the stories from the teenagers involved as they’re talking to the police and the view of Detective Fleet, this is really cleverly constructed. We slowly piece together some of the mysteries surrounding the missing girl and subsequent events. We have a character in Fleet that we can’t help but empathise with, and a resolution that nobody would have desired but which shows certain characters in a very different light to the one we’ve seen them in.

Huge thanks to NetGalley and the publishers, Penguin, for brightening up my day with this read.

‘Some Laneys Died’ – Brooke Skipstone

Thank you to NetGalley and publishers, Skipstone, for granting me access to a most puzzling read that had me scratching my head in equal confusion and wonder.

Having finished, I’m still not entirely sure I’ve grasped some of the finer points of the concept. I found myself reading, then having to pause to actually digest what I’d read and try to work it out/link to what I already knew. I would liken reading this to me trying to solve a Rubik’s cube…I know there’s a knack to it whereby everything flows seamlessly, but I work in fits and starts without really getting anywhere, then by a freak occurrence something will slot into place and it’s done.

When I started reading I wondered what was true and what was in our character Laney’s imagination. She writes stories about alternate universes where different characters sharing her name experience different things. She interacts with people who reference events she thought were dreams which seem to have really taken place. Piece by piece she starts to realise some of these events are merging. This idea of alternate universes and time frames may make more sense to students of maths or physics.

The story as such is not a pleasant one. Laney reads a story about two skeletons found in the woods, dated to a time that she recalls finding her father having sex with an old girlfriend. She is fascinated by what she recalls of that incident and is convinced that the skeletons are the bodies of her and her twin sister (a twin who doesn’t exist in the story we start) who were killed by a sadistic pair of brothers – one of whom is friends with her now. The Laney we follow is switching experiences/times in order to hunt the person who in another time/place killed her and tortured then killed her sister.

For every choice there’s a range of possibilities. Watching Laney try to manipulate her experiences was intriguing. I confess to not always following Laney’s thought process, and the book seemed to give some conflicting messages about addiction and sexuality, but as a whole it was a read I’d recommend.