What can I say? Another great adventure in the Lockwood & Co. series.
This time, there is a supernatural outbreak that is taxing all the agencies in London. Old rivalries are put aside as the agents have to work together to keep alive.
Glamorous new assistant, Holly Munro, causes some upset and the skull in the jar is becoming more and more vocal.
The ending hints at a dark and terrible future. I personally can’t wait for the next in the series!
I received this as a digital copy from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
The novel begins strongly. You’re thrown right into the heart of the action, with our narrator – Gabriella – stuck in a toilet cubicle as her school is on lock-down due to a bomb threat. I had high hopes for this…unfortunately, they weren’t met.
As the novel progresses we learn more about Gabriella and her story is interspersed with comments from the Stranger’s manifesto (comments from the potential bomber). The excitement I felt from the blurb and the opening weren’t, however, maintained.
While I enjoyed elements of this story as I was reading, I can’t help but feel that this could have had more of an impact. It was a reasonable read, but some time after reading there is very little that sticks with me. Perhaps this is one that will speak more to its intended audience.
Justine Merrison is a TV executive who has escaped her high-presssured life in London to move to rural Devon. This was meant to be a new start for the family, but then Justine starts to receive mysterious phone-calls from someone who seems to know more about her than Justine is prepared to tell us.
These calls come at the same time as her daughter, Ellen, is experiencing problems at school after her best friend, George, is excluded. When Justine goes to school to investigate matters, she learns there is no pupil called George. Her concerns for Ellen’s wellbeing are heightened when she reads a chilling story – written by her daughter – about a series of murders committed in their new home.
After losing my interest in Sophie Hannah’s recent novels I felt this was back on form in many ways. It made me doubt my own sanity at times, but it gripped me from the start and I was desperate to know exactly what was going on.
I cannot help but feel that losing one’s memory, and having your sense of self eroded, must be one of the worst things imaginable.
I felt the utmost sympathy for Maud, who writes endless notes to herself but cannot remember when she wrote them. She knows her friend Elizabeth is missing, but seems to have no recollection of why she believes this to be the case. However, she seems to experience a sense of clarity when recalling the facts surrounding the disappearance of her sister, Sukey, many years previously. Unfortunately, as an unreliable narrator we are never quite clear what Maud is remembering and what she thinks she remembers.
This is a book that crosses a number of genres. It was not a comfortable read by any means because of the nature of the illness Maud has, but I did enjoy this story because of the controlled way in which we see the pieces coming together.
David Harwood is a single parent, recently made redundant, and he is living in his home-town of Promise Falls with his parents. Things could be better. As is often the way with fiction, things are about to get a lot worse!
Without going into details, he gets caught up in the aftermath of what can only be described as a horrific murder.
I raced through this, desperate to find out if my hunch about the ‘bad guy’ was correct. It was, but I wish I’d learned more about why he’d acted as he did. The ending also felt a little open-ended for me, but given that this is part of a new series I assume this is to set up what comes next.
I was given a free digital copy of this by Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
If you’ve read and enjoyed Gone Girl then this would seem to be the book that people push you towards. I can see why – it’s touted as a thriller, has a flawed narrator, leads the reader up the proverbial garden path on more than occasion and there are some rather gruesome moments. While I enjoyed Gone Girl, my feelings towards this are less secure.
The general premise is straightforward enough. Rachel catches the same train to and from work every day. On the way she passes what she sees as the ideal couple – who she christens Jess and Jason. One day she sees something from the train that leads her to question whether their relationship is as good as she thinks. Then Megan – the real name of the woman she has christened Jess – goes missing and is discovered dead.
Unfortunately, I really disliked Rachel at the opening of the novel and I wonder if this is a deliberate ploy to get us to reassess our feelings towards her as she gets caught up in events that are way beyond those she imagined from her seat on the train. Her alcoholism and selfish disregard for all around her is irritating, though quite realistic. The characters that she interacts with seemed too one-dimensional and I also found the use of multiple narrators meant the story was quite difficult to piece together clearly.
I got a niggling feeling that the character of Tom was more pivotal to the plot than we were being led to believe quite early on and the red-herring of Scott (Jason in her alternative world) was irritating. As the book progressed I felt desperately sorry for Megan, but it felt as though so many ingredients were being thrown in to this pot by the end that I just wanted it to end.
A great holiday read, but I really don’t think it deserves the hype.
A really mixed bag of reviews for this, and it does seem to be something of a love it or loathe it kind of book. I received a free digital copy of this from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
The first thing I will say is that this is the kind of book that you will race through if you can get over the rather awful beginning. I’m some way out of my teens and perhaps just a little sceptical to have fallen for the rapidity with which Scarlett falls for the new boy in school, Noah. However, with the story being told from varying perspectives it is quickly clear that there is more to Noah than meets the eye.
As so many readers have pointed out, not having many memories before the age of four is quite normal. As we learn more about why Scarlett has ‘forgotten’ her memories we get drawn in to the world of the Eternal Light. I know very little about how cults operate, but I can’t imagine so many people would remain in this kind of environment without questioning some of the things that occur within it – certainly not based on what we learn about the group from within the pages of the novel.
I won’t reveal plot details here because one of the things that kept me reading was the way this could never be pinned down in the way you might expect. This could have been a powerful book. It’s readable, and if you stick with it you will probably enjoy it. Unfortunately, you then start to realise all the things that are nonsensical within the novel, and find reasons to pick holes in it. The ending also felt horribly contrived in order to leave the way open for a follow-on. For me this was a novel that was full of promise, that didn’t really deliver.
I loved the cover of the book, and the general idea of a drug that allowed you to relive your memories was intriguing. I was full of hope for this read, and I am rather disappointed that it didn’t live up to my expectations.
Thank you to NetGalley for sending me a digital copy of the novel to review. I really wanted to like this book, and parts of it were great. The friendship between Jag and Cooper, and some of the ideas behind the memories that people relive had real potential.
Unfortunately, the events of the novel just seemed a little incredulous. I didn’t feel like I cared enough about the characters to really be affected by the events described, and the character that the story hinged upon had been so under the radar throughout that I had to remind myself who they were!
I’m going to pass this book on to my son, and see whether the intended audience has more of a positive reaction.