Book Review: THE PARTY

Title: The Party

Author: Nora Valters

Publisher: Inkubator Books

Pages: 318

My GoodReads Rating: ⭐⭐⭐

The Prologue made no sense at all. I should have skipped it and gone straight to chapter one. It was a whole lot of mysterious stuff that used a lot of words to say things, without really saying anything. Even after finishing the whole book, I couldn’t figure out whose first person PoV had featured in the Prologue. Nor did I care. 

Ruth Hargreaves and her school friends have gathered together for their annual Christmas Eve party at Thandie's house. At the party both accidentally drops Holly's baby, Dylan. Once Baby Dylan quiets down, Ruth sees that there are some bruises on his body which could not have been caused when he fell out of her grasp. But no one else will see reason.

Suddenly she is blacklisted. Ruth is thrown out of their WhatsApp group. Except for Lewis, no one else wants to have anything to do with her. All her friends turn against her with Mihika, a notorious gossip, assuming a very belligerent stance. Even her fiancé, Kofi, breaks off the engagement, and her dad turns against her.

Pushed to a corner by Mihika's relentless badgering, Ruth decides to investigate the cause of Dylan’s bruises. But is she on the right track? Or will she alienate all those who care about her?

The book is written in the first person present tense PoV of Ruth Hargreaves.

I liked the manner in which the author evoked the setting of Salisbury, with descriptions of the local architecture.

We meet a large cast of characters right at the beginning of the book. Between spouses and multiple children per person, there are just too many people named, and this makes it very confusing since it's too early in the book for us to know who's related to who. Very few of the original cast really mattered with reference to the plot events, so it would have been better if the author had given us a sense of a crowded house and a roaring party without naming and introducing every one of them.

I’m mentioning this, because I nearly considered dropping the book, on account of this issue, and picking another. That would have been a pity, because subsequently the book grabbed my attention and didn’t let go.

I couldn't understand why everyone had to treat Ruth so badly. Her dad too is unnecessarily mean to her.

Despite her insane choices and her drinking habit, I felt invested in Ruth because she had her heart in the right place. Fortunately the drinking habit was truly under control. She was genuinely motivated to help Dylan. I watched her make the dodgiest of decisions, certain that she was about to crash and burn, hoping she wouldn’t.

The only other character I cared about was her mother. She was the only one who wasn’t quick to think the worst of Ruth.

The book checks the diversity quotient, inasmuch as it refers to Indians. The annoying Mihika, police sergeant Sid Ahuja and Ruth’s colleague, Amrinder, that’s three characters more than any other nationality.

Of course, other than Mihika, they weren't important.

While I liked the manner in which the story progressed, I didn't appreciate the choice that Ruth made with reference to her relationship.

Some of the sentences were awkwardly constructed. After the main clause, the author suddenly truncated the sentence by dropping the use of valuable pronouns.

(I read this book on NetGalley. Thank you to the author, the publisher and NetGalley.)