Book Review: WHEN I WAS YOU

Title: When I Was You

Author: Minka Kent
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer

Pages: 282

My GoodReads Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Thirty-year-old Brienne Dougray has been looking over her shoulder, living in fear and unable to resume her normal lifestyle, ever since she was stabbed, beaten and robbed. Now she is confined to her home, afraid to venture out. She watches the neighbours, speculating about the nature of their lives for want of something to do.

Her only friend is her tenant, Dr Niall Emberlin, who rooms at her vast home. Niall is an oncologist, and is separated/divorced from his wife, Kate. Brienne has no close friends or family. Her grandparents are dead, and her mother abandoned her when she was a little child.

She receives a key to an apartment at the Harcourt, a luxury residential building, and thinks it is a scam. When she calls for information, she is told that she has paid for six months for a one-bedroom unit in the building. Brienne believes that it may be a clue to discovering the identity of her attacker, and thus get closure. She also suspects that he may have sold her identity.

Logging on to FB with a dummy account, she discovers Brienne Dougray, even though she herself has never been on FB. This Brienne Dougray is someone who is eerily like her, but not her. Later, she visits the apartment at the Harcourt, and finds there a woman who looks, dresses and acts like her, and drives the same car. Who is she? And why is she living as Brienne?

The question of the impersonation and stolen identity is not the only one that plagues Brienne. She also suffers jealousy at the thought of Niall reconciling with his estranged wife, Kate. Brienne furtively reads Kate’s diary, which she finds in Niall’s room, to find out more about their marriage.

But there is more to the truth than what’s inside Brienne’s head? Is the other woman stealing Brienne’s life? Or is she the real Brienne, whose life our narrator is obsessed with?

Having suffered trauma, Brienne is the classic example of an unreliable narrator. I rooted for her, even though it was hard to trust her, and I hated the antagonist (no spoilers here).

The story is written in the first person present tense PoV of Brienne in Part I. In Part II, it shifts to the first person PoV of Niall, and in Part III, we get alternate chapters in Brienne’s and Niall’s PoVs.

The first part I found a little slow. The author seemed to take her own sweet time, getting to the point of why Brienne deserved our attention, but by the end of it, our patience was well rewarded. The pace soon became fast and relentless.

I liked how Brienne and Niall fit so well together, in Brienne’s account. At that point, I had no idea which way the story would go. But by the time I got to the end of Brienne’s account, I found that it had jumped several hoops at once. By the time, we got to Niall’s account, the story had shot through the roof.

One grouse, the author should have thought of different names for the few characters. The main character is Brienne, and then there are two Brians in the story, one of them inconsequential, the other minor, but still part of the story. It doesn’t really confuse the reader, but why in a world teeming with names, did the author have to give us variations of Brian?

There were three quotes from the book that stood out for me in the light of how the book turned out.

People get too comfortable living with their own assumptions. I read this line and wondered if Brienne’s tendency to do exactly that would be her undoing.

I realized how many doors would open for you if you simply told people what they wanted to hear. No one’s interested in the truth. Most of us just think we are.

At the end of the day, we just want to believe whatever makes us feel good inside. Whatever makes us feel safe. Whatever lets us sleep at night.

There were very few characters in this story, but they were all sharply drawn. All of them ready to take charge of their own lives. Their motivations were so clear, particularly that of the antagonist, who stood out as real, though flawed.

The best thing about this story was that I got caught up in the pace, and kept furiously turning the pages. I couldn’t wait to see how Brienne would re-claim her life.

(I read this book through NetGalley.)

Book Review: LOCK EVERY DOOR

Title: Lock Every Door

Author: Riley Sager
Publisher: Dutton
Pages: 381

My GoodReads Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Lock Every Door begins with an excerpt from the fictitious The Heart of a Dreamer by Greta Manville, a book about a young girl called Ginny who has just secured a home in the Bartholomew, a building that spells the residential address of the city’s elite.

The book is written in the first person present tense PoV of Jules Larsen, and alternates between the present tense, now, and six days ago. As the chapters go on, the flashbacks count down from Six Days Earlier.

Aged 25, Jules is, as the book begins, hit by a car on the busy road outside the Bartholomew. Thereafter she tells us from a secret location about her misadventures in the Bartholomew.

Days earlier, Jules answers an ad advertising a job as an apartment sitter. Recently laid off, cheated in love, broke and homeless, it was the job of a lifetime. All Jules would have to do in return was to stay in the most luxurious and spacious apartment she had ever seen, on the topmost floor of the Bartholomew for three months and be paid $4000 per month.

The catch is that she is not permitted visitors or socialising with the other residents. Despite the restrictions, Jules makes a new friend, Ingrid, another apartment sitter, who shares with Jules her fears regarding the Bartholomew. The very next day, she leaves all of a sudden.

Jules is determined to find out what happened to Ingrid, as a way of getting closure with regard to Jane, her older sister who had suddenly disappeared without a trace at age 17.  But in the Bartholomew, it seems, everyone keeps their minds firmly fixed on their own business.

Jules meets some of the other residents of the building, including the handsome Dr Nick who is her neighbour, and literally the boy next door. She also meets Greta Manville, the bestselling author of The Heart of a Dreamer, a book that had been a favourite with both Jules and Jane. The other residents she meets are former soap opera actress Marianne and her dog.

Jules’ best friend, Chloe, sends her a link to more information about the curse of the Bartholomew, a fact that unnerves Jules. Even though everyone is friendly, Jules quickly learns that nothing is as it appears in the Bartholomew.

The danger mounts before she can safeguard herself. As she looks into the history of the building, she becomes aware of others like her, apartment sitters, people who checked in but were never heard of again. Jules will be able to get out of the Bartholomew alive. That we know at the beginning of the book. But at what cost?

I’ve read Riley Sager’s book, The Last Time I Lied before, and I knew I was in for a racy read with this one too. I was not disappointed.

Jules’ attempts to learn more about the building and its nefarious intentions quickly become our own, and her efforts to plan her escape become heartrendingly real.

It’s all very intense, and that dumbwaiter in the room, I thought it was really cool, and used to such suspenseful effect too.

Between the gargoyles and the spacious décor, the descriptions are intense, and remind you that not all prisons are of the barred type.

Book Review: WATCH ME

Title: Watch Me

Author: Jody Gehrman
Publisher: St Martin's Griffin
Pages: 310

My GoodReads Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Sam Grist has signed up for a creative writing course, not to improve his writing, but to get closer to the teacher, Kate Youngblood, with whom he is obsessed. He has devoured all her books and literally knows everything about them and her.

Her first novel, Pay Dirt, captivates him to the point of madness. He drums up his obsession to believe that they could run away to New York, where they would eat, write, have sex, repeat.

At first Kate, aged 38, can’t deny the attraction. Sam, aged 22, is so enigmatic, so forceful, she feels drawn to him. She tells herself that he is vulnerable. Divorced after having caught her ex-husband in the very act, she is lonely and feels undesired. She longs for male attention, to know that she matters as a woman. This is her weakness and Sam takes advantage of it. The fact that Zoe, her best friend is married and has a newborn baby who needs her completely also exposes her weakness.

Kate is excited about Sam's writing. She fantasises about being his mentor, helping him to hone and sharpen his writing. But Sam is not looking for a mentor so much as a lover.

But then Sam crosses the line, hacking into her email, breaking into her home and office, doing whatever it takes to get closer to her. In doing so, he is willing to remove the obstacles that stand in his way by any means possible. He will do whatever needs to be done to bring his fantasy to life, he and Kate together, writing bestsellers, and having a sexual, mutually obsessive relationship.

Hurt by her divorce, Kate worries that far from being attractive, she is no longer even visible to the opposite sex. Deeply messed up, at one level, she almost encourages his advances, or at least isn’t quite so forceful in discouraging him, just because it feels great to be wanted. She seems to be under his spell. 

She thinks, My life before thirty had a bouncy, upbeat soundtrack, a sinewy bass line with sex at the core. Now I’m in a silent movie.

The trouble is that even though she knows that there is a lot that’s off about him (To me, blood’s another substance, like rain or sap or ink), she can’t deny her feelings. This can only get worse. But how?

Sam’s writing is a close rendition of the truth. Kate wonders if he has killed before. 

Unable to seek advice from anyone, Kate is at the end of her tether. Zoe, is supportive, but can’t do much for her, hemmed as she is between a newborn and her own sleep deprivation.

To make matters worse for Kate, the head of the English department detests her and thwarts her at every step.

How will Kate extricate herself from this situation?

The book is written from the first person present tense PoVs of Sam and Kate.

As a character, I liked Kate. Her vulnerability, the fact that she was flawed enough to make faulty choices. I liked the fact that she loved books, loved the smell of them, loved writing, the art and craft of it.

Kate looks for the perfect metaphor even in the midst of the worst situations. She clings to her art, trying to make sense of the chaos around her.

Sam is a powerful character. Totally amoral, there is nothing he won't do to achieve his aims. The language from his PoV has a rough edge. His insults are sharp: She is young... it will be lifetimes before she's even progressed past infancy.

In a self-revelatory moment, he lets us see him fully. It's not healthy to show people the basement of your soul. Keep them upstairs. In the kitchen or the bedroom. Never give them a tour of your cellar, where the air is fetid and dark. Don't point out the cockroaches skittering across the dripping, slimy walls. Don't show them where you've hidden the bodies.

Another thing I liked about this book was that there was so much related to the craft and the sheer exhilaration of writing. Kate needs to get a thousand words done each morning. Waking up dying to get back to the story only I can tell… because I have got a paragraph inside my head that has to come out. That paragraph turns into a page, and that page turns into a scene… I’m flying through the story, free-falling without a net.

The book captures the writer's life so perfectly. It never goes away, that sense that you have turned yourself inside out for the world, that you have slaved to expose every muscle, tendon and vein; in response, the world casually throws acid at your steaming innards.

Elsewhere she speaks of a war with words, my torrid affair with verbiage, my love-hate relationship with my characters.


She tells us about how the ideas come to her, all sagged and wilted after a few pages, their characters losing steam, wandering off into the fog.

She imagines her life as a book jacket blurb and describes it as trying to stuff a bag of squirming cats into a hatbox. She tries to milk her own life, squirreling away the details for later use.

I enjoyed reading about the classroom sessions in which the students all dissect and critique one another’s writing. The conversations on the craft of writing I lapped up.

The prose is beautiful. Isn’t it sad, the way we grasp the beauty of everything too late? We stumble through life like sleepwalkers, floating on the mundane, resentful of everyday inconveniences… Only in the last seconds of our lives do we realize how much we want to live.

The figures of speech were a treat: Vivienne tore through men in a way that was both casual and desperate, like a bulimic gorging on junk food she'll soon puke.

This story about obsession and dangerous desire was intriguing. On the lookout for more from this author.

Book Review: GUILTY INNOCENCE

Title: Guilty Innocence

Author: Maggie James
Publisher: Orelia Publishing
Pages: 361

My GoodReads Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

Natalie Richards suspects that her on-off boyfriend Mark Slater is having an affair with another woman. Snooping through his apartment, she finds the worst evidence. That he is Joshua Barker, who, along with his friend, Adam Campbell, lured 2-year-old Abby Morgan to her death when they were only 11.

Rejected by Natalie, Mark is consumed by the desire to atone for that crime, even though he was not the one to lure Abby or batter her mercilessly and then stab her over and over again. Mark’s crime was weakness, inability to stand up to Adam. Unhappy, but unable to rebel. 

Weakness, like his father, who enabled his wife’s domineering nature all his life. Weakness at allowing himself to become the sidekick of Adam, who is a monster even at age 11.

Tony Jackson, his parole officer, needs to be told in case of any serious relationships. But Mark can’t bring himself to tell, especially now that the relationship is over, nor the fact that his identity has been breached.

As he nears the anniversary of Abby’s killing, he becomes obsessed with the idea of atonement. Landing up at the sight of Abby’s vigil, he is recognised there by Adam Campbell. In a moment of senseless action, he shares his phone number with Adam. In another moment of similar negligence, he makes contact with Rachel Morgan, the dead child’s older sister.

As Rachel develops feelings for Mark, things get severely tangled for Mark. Will he manage to extricate himself, or does he face prison time again? In a case of this sort, where the line between guilt and innocence is so thin, is there any hope for redemption for Mark?

As readers, we watch aghast, helpless to intervene and save Mark from himself. Unable even to take our eyes off his situation, knowing that no good can come of his actions and that he has doomed himself. It’s as if he has become 11 again, and is under the spell of Adam, unable to make a rational choice.

The story is written in the third person present tense PoV of Natalie, Mark and Rachel.

The chapter headings give us a foretaste of what is in store for that character.

The writing is beautiful. Maternity, after all, involves more than a woman opening her legs for the conception and birth.

Their embrace is like two magnets of the same polarity being forced together.

'It didn't mean anything...' The age-old excuse given by faithless partners everywhere, in the deluded belief that meaningless betrayal is preferable to deliberate intention. If it means so little, why do it? 

There are full sentences interspersed with fragments, making it all seem more real and intense, and going well with the present tense in which the book is written.

There are descriptions of sex, and one description of an act of sexual violence. The latter act has been written so sensitively that it fills us with a sense of pain. Our hearts go out to the character who has suffered this act.

Both Natalie and Mark are broken by their pasts, deeply flawed individuals. We get the details of their pasts through well written flashbacks. We see how their pasts influence their lives today and the wrong choices they often end up making.

It’s hard for us to believe that one boy could have lured and killed a little child while another boy is helpless to stop him. But the flashback shows us how it happens. How events culminated in the killing of the child.

The book raises issues of parenting, abandonment and other psychological issues, handling them sensitively in prose that stays with you. We see the dangers that dysfunctional families and emotionally unavailable parents pose to vulnerable children. 

Through the story of Mark and Natalie, we see how deeply the scars inflicted in childhood affect the course of our lives.

A beautiful read indeed.

Book Review: THE LAST TIME I LIED

Title: The Last Time I Lied

Author: Riley Sager
Publisher: Dutton Books
Pages: 370

My GoodReads Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

The title of the book, The Last Time I Lied, is a blend of guilt and contrition, the recurrent themes of one of my favourite reads this year.

The Prologue is in the second person present tense point of view of 13-year-old Emma Davis when she wakes up early in the morning at Camp Nightingale and, after a fruitless search, realizes that Allison, Natalie and Vivian, her roommates in Dogwood, the lodge she is assigned to at the camp, who walked out of the camp the previous night, have not returned.

Subsequently there is a furore in the media, and a great scandal, and the camp is closed down. The bodies of the three girls are never found, even though the entire area is searched. The tragedy alters all their lives irrevocably.

Emma misses Vivian. As the only child of parents who never showed affection, Emma got something approximating that from Vivian. But Vivian could also be a bitch, catty and manipulative in her desire to have her own way.

Fifteen years later at the first gallery showing of her paintings, Emma has an unexpected visitor, Francesca Harris-White, rich heiress in her 70s, the owner and manager of Camp Nightingale, better known as Franny.

Franny has an interesting proposition for Emma. Return to Camp Nightingale for six weeks as a painting coach. Anxious to get closure, Emma agrees to go back to the camp, which is being reopened after 15 years. The return dredges up memories and flashbacks, at once happy and painful and guilt-ridden.

This time too, she is reassigned to stay at Dogwood with three teenagers, Sasha, Krystal and Miranda. Now Emma has a chance to find out what happened to the three girls. Will she succeed in finding out the truth about what happened in the past? Or will tragedy strike again?

By the end of Part One comes a stunning shocker that turns the story on its head. Will Emma get the closure she desperately needs? Or will her guilt be finally revealed?

Part One is called Two Truths, while Part Two is called And a Lie, after the game that Vivian introduces to Emma at camp, the game which not only helps the four roommates reveal truths about themselves but also helps them understand how and what somebody might choose to lie about. It is a game that Vivian excels in, one that Emma learns to use to her advantage. I found this game most intriguing for its possibilities for invoking truth as much as for exhibiting willful deceit.

The writing is dark, evoking mystery and curiosity on our part. The narrative shifts between now in the present tense and 15 years ago in the past tense.

The memories help us to piece things together, and we learn a lot of things, not all in Emma’s favour. But the whole truth can be hard to grasp when it is being dished out by someone who knows how to trick with it.

The mood that the author evokes at Camp Nightingale is that of mystery, intrigue and dread, complete with the adventure and fun of camp life.

Following each memory in the present, Emma takes us back to the actual memory in the past.

Most of the characters in this book stood out for the right reasons.

There is Emma, who has her own secrets. She comes across as a totally unreliable narrator. She’s been institutionalized for mental instability, her mother is an alcoholic, and she herself has a tendency to lose control after a few drinks. There were many aspects relating to Emma that I found uncomfortable. She admits that she is responsible for the disappearance of the girls; she just won’t tell us how. She is haunted by the girls. Surely that is admission of guilt enough?

Franny has the money to buy her way out of complicated situations, but can she be trusted? Taking our cues from Emma, we aren’t sure. And yet Franny is genuinely sincere about her love for the outdoors, and her desire to give the city girls a taste of life and adventure in the open.

For all her heightened drama, Vivian grew on me. She made things happen. Nothing stayed stagnant around her. Even though she was the sort of person who could go to any lengths to ensure that she remained in control, she was also capable of showering attention on a younger girl, bereft of affection.

In contrast, the other two girls, Natalie and Allison are bland. We hardly notice them. Like Emma, we are swept away by the lure of Vivian. Fifteen years later, it is as if Sasha, Krystal and Miranda have stepped into the shoes of the older girls, with Miranda trying hard, but not quite succeeding, to be a queen bee.

The chemistry between Theo and Emma grows slowly. Emma is never sure of Theo. Though she considers him her friend, his loyalty to his mother is undeniable. And she wonders how far he would go to protect his mother and hide her secrets.

There were several lines that are worth quoting. Here’s a sample:

a sight that reminds me of air hissing from a punctured tire.

The descriptions: It’s a greenhouse in the same way Grand Central is a train station.

Mrs Harris-White doesn’t like messes.

Every woman is crazy.

Mindy, the fiancee, of Franny’s younger son, is the kind of girl who wields a smile like a scythe. I didn’t like her either.

The Last Time I Lied is a tightly plotted delicious blend of crime thriller, psychological thriller and ghost story, with mental instability thrown in for good measure. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

(I received an ARC from First to Read).

Book Review: THE DEAD HOUSE: A NOVEL

Title: The Dead House: A Novel

Author: Billy O'Callaghan
Publisher: Arcade Publishing
Pages: 224

My GoodReads Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

The Dead House by Billy O’Callaghan is high on atmosphere and silent menace and manages to keep the tension high right up to the end.

The book is written from the first person past tense point of view of Michael Simmons, an art agent, married to Alison and the father of Hannah. Michael gets pulled into the drama of Maggie Turner, an artist-cum-friend, for whom he cares deeply.

Getting away from an abusive relationship, Maggie buys an old dilapidated house in a scenic locale and spends a fortune, borrowing heavily from Michael, in renovating it. Once done, she invites Michael, an art gallery owner-friend Alison, with whom she wants to set Michael up, and Liz, a poet, for the housewarming. That weekend, Liz brings out an Ouija board, and for the fun of it, summons spirits to get in contact with them. A spirit calling itself The Master asks permission to enter in Irish. Only their Irish language skills being weak, they mistake the question for permission to join.

Slowly the joy leaves Maggie as she lets the house go to seed, living with the stench of death and the real presence of the Master in the house.

Michael and Alison decide to drive down and make one big effort to save her. Will they succeed? Will the evil release its hold on Maggie? Or will it consume all their lives?

This, to me, was horror of the worst kind, the horror of watching a loved one lost forever to something inexplicable rather than just things going bump in the night. This book will really terrify you, once you imagine something as terrible as this happening to someone you care for.

The Dead House is not a typical ghost story. The book ends on an unsettling note. There is a sense of something terrible waiting to happen. The horror of it is like a sword dangling on our heads. We know it is going to fall. The question is when.

When the horror appears to want to take little Hannah into its fold, Michael and Alison realise that their worst nightmare has invaded the present. For us as readers too, this is a disquieting realization. The fact that the author makes no promise of an upcoming sequel in which the horror might be put to rest makes the situation even worse.

Part I shows us Michael in the present, telling us of his friendship with Maggie. Part II takes us to her obsession with the house and the summoning of the spirit. Part III is back in the present, 9 years later.

The physical descriptions of that part of Ireland are hauntingly beautiful, and reading these passages gave me gooseflesh. It’s almost as if the place doesn’t exist on the same plane as the rest of us do. In a city with its crowds and traffic noise, reality is a sheet of thick glass… Out here, just like the ocean, it pulls to tide and current. And, just like the ocean, its surface can be easily broken.

The descriptions give us a glimpse of the generations that have existed, centuries ago, never knowing of other lives. Of places where time stood still, where nothing had changed, where rocks, ocean, sky, wind and rain were the only things that weren’t fleeting.

Michael is a pragmatic man, who comes from a belief system that doesn’t subscribe to anything not of this world. The stains of skepticism are just as hard to scrub away as those of faith. But living through the horror that engulfs Maggie, he changes his mind. We glimpse or experience something that defies explanation and we either accept the stretch in our reality or we choose to turn our heads away.

In a book beset with bad men such as Maggie’s abusive ex-boyfriend Pete and Alison’s ex-husband Laurence who modelled the term ‘selfish bastard’ at professional catwalk level, Michael comes across as an inherently good man.

But even he admits that he could have done more to save Maggie, to prevent the nightmare that happened to her, or even to make some attempt, futile though it may have been, to rescue her. We all think that we’ll walk through walls for the people who matter most to us, that we’ll willingly push ourselves against the muzzle of a gun for them. But we can’t know. Not until the moment arrives.

His experiences give him a new perspective on places that are supposed to be haunted, an explanation that he clings to because the alternative would drive him crazy. People talk all the time about haunted places… But I’m not sure it has much to do with ghosts. I think it just means it’s held tightly by the past in ways that other places aren’t.

We receive no clear answer about what happened to Maggie or to what the Master did to her. We can only imagine how horrible the consequence may have been, given that the reveries summoned to Maggie’s mind during the Ouija session are so deeply disturbing. We are reminded of issues such as mortality and the beyond and what reality is, and how much of the other world presses down on us.

The Prologue seeks to introduce the subject to us in a philosophical vein. By the end of the book, neither Michael nor we have much use for the philosophy. So strong is the sense of terror conjured up.

(I read this book through NetGalley.)

Book Review: BAD GIRLS WITH PERFECT FACES

Title: Bad Girls With Perfect Faces
Author: Lynn Weingarten
Publisher: Simon Pulse
Pages: 304
My GoodReads Rating: ⭐⭐⭐

Bad girls with perfect faces by Lynn Weingarten tells us of the unpredictable ways in which the sanest individuals react when they realise that their dear ones have acted in monstrous ways.

On the eve of the 17^th birthday of Xavier, her best friend, Sasha decides to tell him about her feelings for him. He has just about recovered from a bout of severe depression after having been dumped by his ex-girlfriend, Ivy.

Sasha decides that tonight, she will tell him all, take a deep breath, open my mouth, and let my heart climb right out of it. In the last one month, they have shared one drunken rum-soaked kiss, and Sasha hopes they have a future together.

They go out to their regular haunts and they are having a good time when Sasha literally senses the presence of Ivy around, deep in my gut the way some animals sense an earthquake just before it comes. Ivy has come there with her best friend, Gwen, who had been best friends with Sasha, when they were in the 4^th grade.

When Ivy and Xavier get together again, Sasha feels compelled to act. She knows that Xavier is as deeply entranced this time around, as he was earlier. She also knows that Ivy’s liaisons with random men will continue and that she will hurt him again.

Sasha pictures Ivy reaching in, tearing out his heart, putting it into her mouth, and eating it. She opens a fake account in the name of Jake Jones, and then begins chatting with Ivy, in the hope of collecting proof of her faithlessness. Over the course of 18 days, they text hundreds of times, flirting with each other, getting closer.

When Ivy and Jake finally agree to meet, Sasha hopes to catch Ivy red-handed. But tragedy unfolds, affecting all their lives with unforeseen and terrible consequences.

For the most part, the story is written in alternate viewpoints of Sasha and Xavier. Sasha’s is first-person, while Xavier’s is in third-person. Halfway through the book, the author introduces a mystery PoV. Is it Ivy? Or someone else?

Sasha is very mature for her age. She knows how easy it is to lose someone and how there are so many different ways for it to happen. She has a keen sense of humour. I appreciated the playful banter between Sasha and Xavier, how they ‘got’ each other.

Sasha is a strong character, and so is Ivy. Xavier, their object of affection, remains weak in contrast. His niceness is all that seems to be his strong point.

If there was anything that the four young characters had in common, it was the minimal presence of their parents in their lives. Xavier’s parents are emotionally dry, uncomfortable with expressing affection. Ivy openly rebels against her parents through her lifestyle. Sasha’s mother jet sets around the world with her latest boyfriend; she does not mention her father. Gwen’s mother is dead of cancer.

Ultimately, everyone, it seemed, was hurtling towards self-destruction. The characters lost their heads, drinking beyond limits, often losing count of reality in the process. Also, there was an unhealthy addiction to Instagram, of living life for the benefit of sharing it on the social media.

There are some beautiful lines in the book, all in Sasha’s accounts, which make you stop and ponder.

The faraway monster always looks different than the monster in front of you, in your arms, in your heart. When someone you cherish does something incomprehensible, you will find reasons to decide they are the exception. You will cling to the details; telling yourself, but this is different. But it never is.

No one thinks the people they love are monsters. Because love is the biggest liar of all.

Later she adds, We are all capable of both more and less than we ever could have imagined.

She also says, A heart too full is like a bomb. One day it will explode.

And that’s exactly what happens.

There are a lot of twists and turns in this one, and sometimes it was hard to imagine that people can actually act in such bizarre ways. But then I had to remind myself that the characters were all high-school students –- a time when people literally let their hormones do the thinking for them.

The book also skirts around issues relating to social media, sexuality and mental illness, with at least two characters questioning their own mental health.

The whole point is about how far we may go to save the ones we love, and about how we make mistakes, and then set out to rectify those mistakes, only to end up making bigger ones.

The cover image, a full lipstick with flies buzzing around it, is a reminder of how something that looks beautiful and sexually enticing can often be rotten at its core.

Book Review: THE TWIN GAME

Title: The Twin Game
Author: VJ Chambers
Publisher: Punk Rawk Books
Pages: 251
My GoodReads Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐

I enjoy reading books about twins. I find them a fascinating subject. Two people with the same DNA, people who should have been one, but are two. That is why I picked up The Twin Game, and was totally pleased to see what a fantastic thriller it turned out to be.

The first chapter, acting as a Prologue, tells us about a man stalking a woman, hinting at dark things, telling us in the first person how he is planning to do her harm.

The second chapter moves to the first-person account of Hope Ross, who has just been released from a mental health care facility. She returns to the massive manor house she calls home, the one that only houses twin sister Serenity, since their parents are both dead. Returning home, she and Serenity, who hasn’t spoken to her in years, occupy opposite wings of the home.

Hope is concerned about the serial killings that have been plaguing the town for a long time, but the voices of authority, Inspector Radcliff and the family physician, Dr Gunther, both disbelieve her allegations, insisting her mental illness makes it difficult for her to think straight, fostering the belief that she is delusional. Both also insist that Serenity does not exist, that she is making her up.

Hope insists that she was assaulted by a serial killer, Neil Stillwater, who was the drama teacher when Hope was in high school.

Rhys, Hope’s childhood friend, now a film star, picks her up at the facility and moves into the manor, insisting that he is doing it to keep her safe. His presence pleases Hope. Rhys is, after all, the only person who knows Serenity, who played with both girls when they were kids.

Even as a child, Hope had been raised to never tell anyone about Serenity. She and Rhys used to play the Pretend-Serenity-does-not-exist game.

When Hope finds evidence of a deranged woman, her mother’s twin, having been hidden in the attic, and discovers rotting bodies and skeletons in the basement, she realizes that the danger is very real. But then she is accused of attempted murder, and it seems that even Rhys thinks she is crazy.

The book raises questions about whether Stillwater is to blame for the killings, and if insanity does indeed run in the family.

Hope is an unreliable narrator. Her insistence on Serenity being real leaves us feeling confused for a long time. We can’t tell whether Serenity is real or not, whether Hope is delusional, lying or imaginative.

Hope does flip flops between realities, and we don’t know whether to trust her or not. She keeps getting flashes of insights relating to things that her memory does not back her on. Maybe she’s crazy, and maybe she’s also trustworthy.

There are more than a few grammatical and proofing errors, but they don’t take away from the thrill that the book gives us.

There are literally twists and turns on every page. The pace just doesn’t falter.

I look forward to reading the author’s other books.