Book Review: ENDLESS FEAR

Title: Endless Fear
Author: Adrianne Lee
Pages: 249
My GoodReads Rating: ⭐⭐

 
At age 14, April Farraday’s life changed when her mother, actress Lily Cordell-Farraday, fell down the stairs and died. That was 12 years ago. Since then, April has not been able to get the thought out of her mind that she may have been the one to push her mother down.

Having spent the intervening years in a sanitarium, April is now back at Calendar House, her old home, where she has been invited for the formal engagement party of her stepbrother, Thane Garrick.

An ominous note has warned her to stay away, but April is determined to go, hoping to unlock the memories around her mother’s death. Meanwhile, it appears that whoever sent the note has some dangerous plans for her. Accidents keep happening to her, and April is unsure who to trust.

Is old love Spencer to blame, or her stepmother, Cynthia? Will she recover her memories in time or end up losing her life?

 

It was hard to get a timeline on this book, but since none of the characters had cellphones, I assumed it was the eighties.

 

The passages written from the viewpoint of the villain of the piece were rather weak. The entire mystery felt very tepid at the end of it all?

 

There were a lot of proofing errors in this book. Some of the descriptions are banal. With her blood the temperature of ice water. In the same paragraph, we get her mouth felt as dry as the desert outside, her palms as damp as the dew on the cacti.

We are told that April’s father forgot ‘amenities,’ instead of the right word, ‘niceties.’

 

The descriptions are another annoyance. There are repeated references to the colour of character’s eyes and hair, which is distracting and takes away from the action. Spencer’s hair is at first chocolate, then coffee brown, and then chocolate again. His eyes are dove gray, then pewter.

The number of times that Spencer and April kiss each other before Spencer pulls apart is once too often. The forward and backward dance between them continues throughout the book. The entire misunderstanding between them could have been sorted out if they had only spoken, but neither seems to have the good sense to do that. And so, we are left with a book which could have been shorter.

There is a lot of repetition. A lot of characters staring at each other over a certain number of ‘long seconds.’

The Farradays name their children after the month in which they are born. So April’s dad is August, her aunt is called March, and her half-sister is called July. This comes across more as a gimmick than an eccentricity. What if a boy were to be born in May or June? Or a girl in February?

Crusty old Aunt March didn’t get enough space in the book. And then there was all the skirting around Spencer. April though of Cynthia as her stepmother, and Thane as her stepbrother. But Thane’s twin brother, Spencer, was not once referred to as a stepbrother. That was awkward.