Book Review: DO NOT BECOME ALARMED by Maile Meloy

Title: Do Not Become Alarmed

Author: Maile Meloy
Publisher: Penguin Books UK, Viking
Read: June 2017

Expected publication: 6 July 2017

My Rating:🌟🌟🌟

"Do you think worrying helps?" "Yes," she said. "Because the disaster will be the thing you don't expect. So you just have to expect everything."

Book Description (Goodreads):

When Liv and Nora decide to take their husbands and children on a holiday cruise, everyone is thrilled. The ship's comforts and possibilities seem infinite. But when they all go ashore in beautiful Central America, a series of minor mishaps lead the families further from the ship's safety.

One minute the children are there, and the next they're gone.

What follows is a heart-racing story told from the perspectives of the adults and the children, as the distraught parents - now turning on one another and blaming themselves - try to recover their children and their shattered lives.

My musings:

Cruise ship mysteries have become quite popular recently, and after reading a few intriguing stories that were based around the various legal loopholes of crime at sea, my interest was immediately piqued by the premise of Do Not Become Alarmed (although I found the title a bit odd). However, in this novel the cruise becomes a secondary setting, as the disappearance of the children happens on land, during a moment when their mothers’ attentions are focused on other things – one has fallen asleep on the beach, whilst the other is having a sexual encounter in the bushes with their tour guide. Perhaps neither of them can be credited with the mother of the year award for that one!

From this moment on, most of the story is being told from the eyes of the children, and I quite enjoyed their individual POVs as their lives are being turned upside down. Their innocent observations and analysis of the situation was a like a breath of fresh air compared to that of the adults, who all seem rather stereotypical, somewhat wooden portrayals of your average middle-class privileged American married couple, although there are some moments were Meloy offers an insight into their psyche that makes them more likeable:

People regressed, around their families, to the age at which they had been angriest. With her mother, Liv was always fifteen.

But in the aftermath of their children’s’ disappearance, I didn’t get much sense of emotional turmoil in the parents’ actions and behaviour, which let the story down for me. As a mother, I was terrified to imagine the gut-wrenching terror these people would / should be feeling as they encounter one dead end after another in locating their offspring, in a foreign country with an unfamiliar police system. Some peripheral characters, which had initially intrigued me, ended up adding very little to the storyline, which felt like a lost opportunity.

Whilst the story kept me turning the pages (in part because I was intrigued by the unfamiliar armchair travel setting, and still held some hope for the general premise to come into its own), I felt like I was missing the point somehow.  Although the author had laid some solid groundwork with the lead-up, I got the impression the story got a bit lost with too many different threads diluting the tension. Personally, I would have liked some more mystery and suspense to really make the most of the promising premise the author had alluded to.

Summary:

All in all, Do Not Become Alarmed was a quick and easy read with an intriguing premise, which included some interesting armchair travel to Latin America. Whilst for me it did not quite live up to its potential, and did not contain enough mystery or suspense to make it memorable, the themes of child abduction and a cruise gone terribly wrong may appeal to readers who enjoy a slow-burning family drama for an undemanding and  pleasant holiday read. 

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for the free electronic copy of this novel and for giving me the opportunity to provide an honest review.