Thank you to Penguin Random House and the First to Read program for this ARC in exchange for an honest review.
Sometimes, I forget the premise of a book. But instead of looking it up, I read it as is and try to figure out what the story is all about. I find that it makes the reading experience more enjoyable, especially when the novel is a thriller. Here is my review:
3 little girls headed off to school one morning in May. Within an hour, 1 of them is dead.
15 years later, Alison and Kitty are living separate lives. Kitty lives in a care home. She can’t speak or move properly and has no recollection of the accident that put her here. Alison is an art teacher who struggles to make ends meet. when a job to teach prison inmates opens up, she decides to take it. Maybe now, she can finally make things right. Art teacher Alison looks fine on the surface. But the surface is a lie. When a job in a prison comes up she decides to take it – this is her chance to finally make things right. But things aren’t all what they seem. Someone is watching Kitty and Alison, someone who wants revenge for what happened that day. And only another life will suffice…
This novel was told from 2 perspectives: Alison and Kitty. I thought that this was quite a different thriller than what I’m used to. Maybe this was because I had no idea about the premise before reading this novel, but I found the writing to be really appealing and the story caught my attention right away. Having a character with a mental and physical disability is something very unique, and I thought the author did a really great job of representing this character’s difficulties in life. I also really liked that the author made Kitty a bitchy person; most authors try to garner pity for the disabled character but the author didn’t try to do that here. However, I didn’t really like Alison’s character. A lot of the things she did made no sense, and while the author did explain it at the end, the explanation didn’t cut it for me. The main theme for this story is about what it means to be sisters and how far you would go to protect your sibling. Considering that I have a sister who is 8 years younger than me, a lot of the reasons behind hiding the truth was understandable from me. I wasn’t ever able to predict any of the twists which was nice, but I didn’t care much for the plot after the halfway point. I don’t want to reveal too much of the story but it just didn’t really seem to flow at this point of the novel. However, I did like the focus on the sibling relationship… but maybe this is because of my own partiality to stories about sisters. Since I liked the theme and most of the story, I’m giving this a 3/5 stars. But note: this was a really hard novel to rate because I was torn at points on whether I liked the story or not.
Happy reading ~