“Roanoke girls never last long
around here. In the end, we either run or we die.”
Following her mother’s suicide,
fifteen year old Lane Roanoke goes to live with her Grandparents and cousin,
Allegra, on the family estate in rural Kansas.
Quickly bonding with her cousin, Lane enjoys a carefree summer of
swimming, sunbathing and swoon, when she falls for local boy, Cooper. For Lane,
who has grown up in the care of a mother who never showed her any affection at
all, this new life of hers seems too good to be true. And it is. The truth is that every Roanoke girl has a
secret, and when Lane eventually stumbles upon the truth of who she is, she
runs. She doesn’t look back. She leaves Allegra behind.
Ten years later, Allegra is missing
and Lane, the last of the Roanoke girls, is back on the family estate, hoping
to solve the mystery of her cousins’ disappearance. Did Allegra run? Or has yet
another Roanoke girl gone to her death too soon?
An unsettling depiction of life
in a road-to-nowhere rural town, Engel’s adult debut will appeal to readers who
love the darkness that permeates the novels of Gillian Flynn. This one, though,
lacks those killer twists that make Flynn’s novels so compelling. If you don’t
guess the Roanoke secret before reading this book, then you won’t have too long
a wait before finding out: the reveal comes early, and though it is disturbing,
it is not at all unexpected. Meanwhile, the mystery of what happened to Allegra
is, in the end, much less of a mystery than I was hoping for.
In short: dark and compelling, but lacks a knockout punch.
Rating: 3.5/5.
Published March 7th 2017 by Hodder & Stoughton.
Received for review.
*****
Like a lot of
places, the town of Battle Creek, Pennsylvania is a town where nothing much
ever happens – until it does. The year
is 1991, and Hannah Dexter is trying her very best to survive high school by
not drawing attention to herself. It
doesn’t work. No matter how she tries to blend into the background, Hannah
remains Nikki Drummond’s number one target. Even fact that Nikki’s boyfriend Craig has
just committed suicide doesn’t make this mean girl change her ways. Enter Lacey
Champlain.
Confident and
feisty, Kurt Cobain worshipping Lacey is everything that Hannah is not. Hannah can’t figure out why someone like
Lacey wants to be friends with someone like her, but she doesn’t question it.
Truth is, Hannah is just happy to have a friend. Soon Hannah, now known as
‘Dex’ since Lacey decided that Hannah wasn’t really working as a name, is
sneaking out, fooling around and rocking out to Nirvana. She’s also determined,
with Lacey’s help, to get her revenge on Nikki Drummond.
Girls on Fire,
the first adult offering from prolific YA author Robin Wasserman (The Book of
Blood and Shadow, The Waking Dark), is a twisted and violent, yet ultimately
underwhelming affair. Like Emma Cline in her novel The Girls, Wasserman’s prose
here is often vividly purple in colour, while the storyline, though shocking in
its final act, is repetitive and even mundane at times.
Read this if
you like: Pretty Little Dirty by Amanda
Boyden; Suicide Notes from Beautiful Girls by Lynn Weingarten; 90’s nostalgia.
Rating: 3/5
Published May 5th 2016 by Little, Brown.
Purchased.
*****
Who in their
right mind would want to live in a house like this?
That’s the
question I kept asking myself as I was reading The Girl Before by J.P.
Delaney. Though lured by a strong
synopsis that promised a solid mystery, I knew I was in trouble with this book
early on, simply because I didn’t buy the main premise of the story. Even
bearing in mind the crazy cost of London rentals, I just don’t believe that
anyone would want to live at cut-price One Folgate Street, no matter how futuristically
ground-breaking its design might be. Why? Because to live here pretty much
means signing your whole life, including all of your possessions, away. It also
means signing a contract that contains more than two-hundred clauses (I’m not
exaggerating), thanks to a landlord who is, to put it mildly, a complete
control freak.
The landlord in
question is Edward Monkford, the renowned architect who designed One Folgate
Street, and now rents it out to a very select few tenants. Jane is one of these
tenants, as was Emma, the ‘girl before’ of the title. The Girl Before employs a dual timeline, and
it soon becomes clear that both Jane and Emma’s time at One Folgate Street follows
eerily similar patterns, including the fact that both women inexplicably start
to fall for the utterly charmless Monkford. The catch? Monkford has a dark
side. He also has a past. The other catch? Emma didn’t leave One Folgate Street
alive – she left in a body bag. Will
Jane escape the clutches of One Folgate Street before it’s too late? Will she say ‘screw it’ to all those clauses
in her contract, and run? She really should.
An instant bestseller with a movie
in the works, The Girl Before was also recently named ‘Thriller of the Month’
by The Sunday Times. Alas, this cliché-ridden thriller simply did not work for
me. A miss.
Rating: 3/5.
Published January 26th 2017 by Quercus.
Received for review.
*****
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