Book Review: ALL BECAUSE OF YOU

Title: All Because of You

Author: Lissa Lovik

Publisher: Thomas & Mercer

Pages: 331

My GoodReads Rating: ⭐⭐⭐

 

For software coder Chris Fox, it is love at first sight. He is smitten with single mother Serena Archer and starts planning ways to make her part of his life. Stalking her, he comes to know that she is a real estate agent. He fixes up a showing with her, and then asks her out, just before agreeing to pay full price for the house she has shown him.

After a successful first date, the relationship grows smoothly and fast, until it’s time for Chris to be introduced to Serena’s parents. Chris wants Serena to move into the new house he has paid full price for, just so she can get a big commission. But Serena doesn’t want to upset the life of her 14yo son, Cole. Pretty soon, he’s going to great lengths to ensure that his relationship with Serena is perfect. That includes bugging her house, and hiding cameras around so he can see exactly what she is up to.

If there’s one thing he knows, it's that Serena needs to be protected from other men, particularly Derek, who Serena thinks is her best friend. But Chris knows better. He knows it’s only a matter of time before Derek makes a move. But Chris is prepared to act, to do whatever it takes, to secure his love. After all, isn’t that what true love is all about?

 

The story is written in the first and second, addressing Serena, past tense PoV of Chris. The book reminded me so much about You by Caroline Kepnes. Chris seemed to me to be a wannabe version of Joe Goldberg.

 

WHAT I LIKED:

Chris’s interactions with his grandfather make us feel sympathetic towards him. The back story ascribed to Chris, particularly related to his mother, help explain to an extent why he is the way he is. He is also deeply influenced by his grandfather, whose advice, stemming from his experiences with his wife, Chris’s grandmother, direct Chris’s actions.

The writing was good. Here is one metaphor I really liked:

My eye is a corroded garage door that won’t open after Derek punches Chris’s eye. So clever!

I found it very interesting that his name is Fox, and hers is Archer, hunted and hunter, when it is the other way around.

Thankfully, this book was light on the sex scenes. Not completely devoid of smut, but toned down to a great extent. It was something that I had found annoying about You, and I was glad to see that this one was different.

 

WHAT I DIDN’T LIKE:

It was too much like You.

The title reminded me of You. Once I started reading, the similarities continued. Chris is very like Joe Goldberg, though not quite as much on edge. He also has a tendency to address Serena directly, so there is a lot of second person, much like You. Some of the sentences, which directly addressed Serena, also had a rhythm which Kepnes had pulled off in You. For instance, “I hear the metal clink of a paint can hitting the tile . . . a humming that buzzes in my ears, and how long has it been since I’ve been this close to you, Serena?”

Again like Joe, Chris stalks Serena physically and on social media. Just like Joe, Chris is a gentleman, when it seems he is going to get what he wants. When he won’t get what he wants, it might be another story. One not all that different from You.

I told myself that I would have to stop comparing All Because of You to Kepnes’s book, You, if I wanted to enjoy this book. Even so, I found Chris to be not quite as menacing as he could have been. A lot of his actions were predictable. The story itself pans out along predictable lines. There are no shocks or surprises.

Towards the last couple of chapters, the writing flits between 2^nd and 3^rd person, sometimes in consecutive paragraphs, while addressing Serena.

 

WHAT DIDN’T WORK FOR ME:

While we get the back story of Chris as a child, we don’t hear of his previous relationships at all. He’s 34. Surely Serena can’t be his first relationship? He does make a casual reference to his previous relationship, but the author doesn’t tell us anything more.

There is a murder around the 69pc mark, that seems so pointless and unnecessary.

 

ALL SAID AND DONE: A good read, especially towards the end when the action moves at a brisk pace. Unfortunately, it was too influenced by You.

 

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

Book Review: THE MYSTERY OF THE HAUNTED HOUSE

Title: The Mystery of the Haunted House (Sycamore Street Mysteries #1)

Author: Willow Night

Illustrator: Elizabeth Leach

Publisher: Willow Night Press

Pages: 116

My GoodReads Rating: ⭐⭐

 

Sixth-grader Noah and his fourth-grader brother Josh are excited about a supposedly haunted house in their neighbourhood and the single word, Beware, that has been painted high above on one wall.

While Josh is free to indulge his curiosity about the haunted house, Noah feels the weight of his age. Poor boy! As a sixth-grader, he has too much Math homework to do. Soon, they learn that they aren’t the only kids who are interested in the house. There is a girl called Olivia, a new girl in Noah’s class, who is just as keen to know more about it.

The kids decide to join hands in the investigation and it helps that Olivia knows a lot about cameras and electronic bugs and how to spy on the house. But when Josh disappears, Noah and Olivia are forced to act quickly to save Josh. There’s no doubt that he is trapped in the haunted house. How will they ever manage to get him out?

The story is written in the 3^rd person omniscient PoV.

 

WHAT I LIKED:

Olivia is very tech-savvy, and it is really good to see a girl in such a role. She knows a lot about computers and cameras, how to shoot, record and post the evidence to the authorities.

The illustrations by Elizabeth Leach were very nice.

 

WHAT I DIDN’T:

The book ended very abruptly. There should have been some hint that there would be another adventure in the future, or that they couldn’t wait to do some more investigations. Some kind of a cliffhanger to invite young readers to join the kids on their next adventure.

Instead, we are told that the doughnuts were very delicious. I thought it was the end of the chapter, but no, it was the end of the book.

 

WHAT DIDN’T WORK FOR ME:

The flat ending.

Also, the mystery was quite insubstantial. The kids weren’t in any real danger. It is hard for readers to feel invested in characters who are not in danger.

 

ALL SAID AND DONE: The book might be of interest to young kids who are first-time readers. 

 

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

Book Review: SUMMER'S EDGE

Title: Summer’s Edge

Author: Dana Mele

Publisher: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers

Pages: 336

My GoodReads Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

 

Spending a summer weekend at the Hartfords’ lake house has been an annual ritual for high schoolers and childhood friends, Emily Joiner; her best friend Chelsea; her other best friend, Kennedy Ellis Hartford, who is also Chelsea’s ex-girlfriend; Emily’s twin, Ryan, and Ryan’s best friend, Chase. But things have changed now.

Exactly a year after the lake house burned down, trapping Emily inside and killing her, her friends, Chelsea, Kennedy, Ryan, Chase, and Chase’s girlfriend of two years, Mila, have gathered together again. They have all been invited to the grand reopening of the lake house. The survivors will gather at the lake house on the anniversary of the tragedy of Emily’s death, after a year of no contact whatsoever with any of the others. They will spend one last weekend together before they all go off to college.

But the reunion is fraught with tension. They are all wary of each other, as they trade grievances and accusations. Chelsea finds the others, except Ryan, untrustworthy and their explanations and statements fraught with lies. And then Chelsea begins to hear Emily’s voice.

Everyone believes that Ryan wants revenge. But is the truth as simple as that?

 

The story is written in the first-person present tense PoV of Chelsea in the present known as the Summer of Egrets, the PoV of Kennedy two years ago in the Summer of Swallows, and Emily one year ago in the Summer of Swans. It was Emily who had the idea of naming the summers they spent at the lake house after birds. If the summer of egrets sounds a little too much like regrets, there’s a reason why.

Besides the three main PoVs, there are short chapters, the longest a mere 106 words, from an unknown PoV, alternating with every chapter in Chelsea’s account. This unknown PoV seems to have vengeance on their mind. All the action in the book, in each of the three PoVs, takes place on just one night, June 17, in different years in each of the accounts.  

The book is named after the Hartfords’ boat, Summer’s Edge, where some of the most critical action takes place.

 

WHAT I LIKED:

The author does a good job of creating an atmosphere of menace, especially in the scene with Chelsea in the attic and later in the cellar. The tarot cards, the accusations and counter accusations and the unsettling game of Truth or Dare, all add up to a sense of uneasy and brisk action in the story.

The characters are all friends, but there is enough relationship drama to create trouble for everyone. And when Chase introduces Mila to his friends for the very first time, the friendship dynamic gets all messed up. Mila is particularly annoying, as is often the case when an unknown person is initiated into a group where the dynamic is already settled and accepted.

Kennedy’s PoV introduces a paranormal element into the story.

The writing was nice. Here’s a sample of quotes I liked:

Love changes things. It redraws the map.

There are a lot of ways to be haunted. A place, a person, a memory.

No one who hates flowers haunts a garden.

In a hit and run, it isn’t the hit that’s the crime. It’s the run.

Parts of the truth as just as deceitful as blatant lies.

 

WHAT I DIDN’T:

Except for Ryan, I didn’t find any of the characters likeable. They claim that they would die for the others, but they would just as soon be ready to kill their friends too.  

The voices of the three PoVs sounded exactly alike. There was nothing by way of tone or vocabulary to let us know whose head we were in.

 

WHAT DIDN’T WORK FOR ME:

I found it odd that the author gave Emily and Ryan surnames, and Kennedy’s full name is repeated several times. But Chase, Mila and Chelsea don’t get a mention of their surnames even once. Also Chelsea and Chase sound too alike. The author should have come up with names that didn’t sound so similar.

 

ALL SAID AND DONE: The book is a delicious blend of the paranormal with the mundane reality of how mistakes have the capacity of destroying young lives and promising futures. 

 

Book Review: THE HOUSEKEEPER'S SECRET

Title: The Housekeeper’s Secret

Author: Sandra Schnakenburg

Publisher: She Writes Press

Pages: 290

My GoodReads Rating:⭐⭐⭐

 

 

At first the book reminded me of The Help by Kathryn Stockett, where a young white woman, Skeeter Phelan, interviews black women, such as Aibileen, Minny and ten others, who work as maids for white families, and writes down their true stories in a book later published as The Help. As I read on, I realized that the similarity, a member of the family writing about the person who worked for them, was the only similarity. Lee Metoyer, who works as a housekeeper to the Krilich family, is white and this is a different time and a different part of the US.

In 1965, Lee joined the Krilich family as a housekeeper. When she joined, Lilian, the author’s mother, had only one instruction for her children, five girls Roseann, Debbie, Robin, Barb, Sandra, and a boy, Rob. They were not to ask Lee any personal questions about her family or her past.

Lee remained part of the household until 1994, becoming a friend to Lilian, and a second mother to the children.

In 1994, Lee tells Sandra to write a book on her, the book she herself often said she’d write someday but wasn’t able to. Sandra makes a solemn promise to Lee and decides to start interviewing Lee and getting to know her story the very next day. Unfortunately, Lee passes away that night.

In the absence of the primary source, Sandra is unable to follow through with her promise, and it is only decades later that she is able to piece Lee’s story together by interviewing others and through research.

 

The Housekeeper’s Secret is the book that Sandra promised to write. While Lee’s secret is compelling enough, the book falls short as it ends up being about so many things other than Lee.

We learn that Sandra’s father was unreasonable and autocratic, planning a family vacation to Disneyland at just 30 minutes’ notice, another trip to Puerto Rico at just 4 days’ notice and bringing back three baby crocodiles as pets. I was amazed to read about the expanse and luxury of the author’s childhood home, with its laundry chutes, among other things.

The story is written in four parts, divided into Summer, Fall, Winter and Spring. When Summer begins, the children are all young. When the Fall section begins, the timeline has moved ahead by seven years. Lilian gets to know of her husband’s infidelity (he has a second family) and decides to ask for a divorce. But then Sandra, in middle school, meets with a bicycle accident, and suffers traumatic brain injury. She has to relearn to speak, read and write, and rebuild her life from scratch. This section ends when Sandra turns 23, when she goes to college and earns a degree without her father’s financial or emotional support. This is when her parents finally get divorced. The family home is sold, and Lee and Lilian move to a smaller home.

By the time the Winter section starts, 59 percent of the book is over. By now, Sandra is married, and has a job, and she gets busy with her family. She forgets the promise she made to Lee. It is only after her mother’s death in 2008 that the siblings find an urn containing Lee’s ashes in the house, sparking Sandra’s journey anew. This is the 64 percent mark.

The secret is finally revealed at the 74 percent mark. At this point, the prose becomes mellow, more emotional.

I couldn’t sympathise as much as I wanted to with Lee’s past. I felt emotionally distant from her story.

Lee must have extraordinary resilience, I can imagine, but there should have been more commentary about it. The story would have worked better if it had been all about Lee, whether as fiction or non-fiction. As it was, so much of the story was about Sandra’s childhood and family, her college, her husband etc, with a mere 36 percent devoted to the promise in the title.

Of course, it’s not the author’s fault. Lee never revealed her secret herself. Had she done so, we would have learned about how she renewed herself, how she learned to tamp down the parts that brought her pain.

All the questions that Sandy has about Lee, how she is the only one who knows how to help traumatic brain injury, how she lost her teeth and needs dentures, how she knows how to deal with abusive men, her strange walk, her dread of bathtubs, her craze for baseball, are all answered through conjecture.

I have one minor quibble too. Frustrated by an inability to get any answers on the Internet, Sandra’s search gets a boost when a friend, Vickie, gives her valuable information about Lee’s siblings, down to their ages and dates of birth. The author never reveals how Vickie came by this information.

The ending was nice with the Krilich siblings getting a chance to meet Lee's children. 

 

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