Book Review: THE TROPHY CHILD by Paula Daly

Title: The Trophy Child
Author: Paula Daly
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
Read: November 2016
Expected publication: 7 March 2017



Synopsis (Goodreads):

Paula Daly is acclaimed for her distinctive voice, masterful plotting, and terrifying depictions of ordinary people whose everyday lives are turned upside down through deception and murder. In her unsettling new domestic thriller, The Trophy Child, Daly digs beneath the serene surface of the idyllic suburban Lake District community where families strive for perfection, delivering a suspenseful, surprising story of motherhood and fallibility.

Karen Bloom is not the coddling mother type. She believes in raising her children for success. Some in the neighborhood call her assertive, others say she’s driven, but in gossiping circles she’s known as: the tiger mother. Karen believes that tough discipline is the true art of parenting and that achievement leads to ultimate happiness. She expects her husband and her children to perform at 200 percent—no matter the cost. But in an unending quest for excellence, her seemingly flawless family start to rebel against her.

Her husband Noel is a handsome doctor with a proclivity for alcohol and women. Their prodigy daughter, Bronte, is excelling at school, music lessons, dance classes, and yet she longs to run away. Verity, Noel’s teenage daughter from his first marriage, is starting to display aggressive behavior. And Karen’s son from a previous relationship falls deeper into drug use. When tragedy strikes the Blooms, Karen’s carefully constructed facade begins to fall apart—and once the deadly cracks appear, they are impossible to stop.

A thrilling tale of ambition and murder, Daly’s richly imagined world of suburban striving and motherly love is an absorbing page-turner about the illusions of perfection and the power games between husband and wife, parent and child.

My thoughts:

I really enjoyed Paula Daly’s previous novel The Mistake I Made, so was excited to receive a copy of her latest murder / mystery from Netgalley. As with the previous book, The Trophy Child is set in the idyllic Lake District, far removed in my mind from dysfunctional families, murder and mayhem, but a wonderful armchair travel location to get taken to.

Daly’s latest novel again deals with the mistakes people make and their consequences. Karen, who is a “tiger mother” and generally not a very likeable person, has not only made her daughter Bronte’s  life miserable by constantly pushing her to be an overachiever, but her relationship with her son Ewan and her husband Noel also leaves much to be desired. Not to mention her stepdaughter Verity, who is receiving counselling by a psychologist after actually trying to strangle her stepmother. Therefore, when Karen is found murdered and dumped in one of the idyllic lakes in the area, there are suspects galore – it seems that Karen has even alienated and upset random strangers to a point where their murderous tendencies were ready to surface.  And whilst a lack of suspects is never a good thing, DI Joanne Aspinall has her work cut out with too many potential murderers to choose from. This is further complicated by the personal history she has with one of the suspects, which is slightly clouding her ability to stay totally impartial.

Personally, I found the title, The Trophy Child, a little bit misleading, as the mother / daughter dynamic is only one of the features in this tale about an extremely dysfunctional family, the Blooms. Noel, the cheating, absentee father who only married his second wife Karen because she (“accidentally”) fell pregnant during an extramarital affair whilst he was still married to his first wife Jennifer, now in a nursing home with end-stage MS. Karen, the “tiger-mother”, who is pushing her youngest child to the brink of breakdown by asking her to be a prodigy even when according to her teachers she is just an normal little girl with no outstanding talents. The three children, Ewan, Verity and Bronte (honestly, who calls their child that?), who have various problems as a result of the strange family dynamics and with support from either parent sadly lacking.  Yikes! A Brady Bunch they are definitely not! Therefore, when the murder finally happened I didn’t shed any tears for the unlikeable Karen, except that I found her husband Noel equally loathsome. Not only did he stand by and watch his wife push his youngest child to the brink of madness, but he was also sanctimonious enough to think it was perfectly acceptable to have extramarital affairs because he was bored / unhappy / unfulfilled in his marriage/s – boo-hoo! I was therefore mostly disgusted that anyone would fall for this smooth talker – at the cost of my respect for one of the other characters in the book. At least he should have gotten his just-desserts in the end! Anyway, with my blood thus brought to boiling point, the author achieved the coveted highly charged emotional response, which keeps readers reading on and gives fuel for great bookclub discussions.

All in all, The Trophy Child was an enjoyable read, even though it did not grip me quite as much as The Mistake I Made – mainly due to some of the characters, who were sadly lacking in any redeeming features in my opinion. If you enjoy murder / mysteries centring around dysfunctional families that may appear quite normal on the outside, then definitely give this one a go. 

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for providing me with a free electronic copy of this novel in exchange for an honest review. 

Book Review: SWIMMING LESSONS by Claire Fuller

Title: Swimming Lessons
Author: Claire Fuller
Publisher: Penguin Books UK
Read: November 2016
Expected publication: 26 January 2017



Synopsis (Goodreads):

Ingrid Coleman writes letters to her husband Gil about the truth of their marriage, but instead of giving them to him, she hides each in the thousands of books he has collected over the years. When Ingrid has written her final letter she disappears from a Dorset beach, leaving behind her beautiful but dilapidated house by the sea, her husband, and her two daughters, Flora and Nan.


Twelve years after her disappearance, Gil thinks he sees Ingrid from a bookshop window, but he’s getting older and this unlikely sighting is chalked up to senility. Flora, who has never believed her mother drowned, returns home to care for her father and to try to finally discover what happened to Ingrid. But what Flora doesn’t realize is that the answers to her questions are hidden in the books that surround her. Sexy and whip-smart, Swimming Lessons holds the Coleman family up to the light, exposing the mysterious and complicated truths of a passionate and troubled marriage.

My thoughts:

There is so much to love about this book, it is hard to know where to start!

Swimming Lessons is told in a dual time frame, the present time told in third person mainly through the eyes of the youngest daughter, Flora, whilst the past is being explored by a series of letters Ingrid wrote to her absent and cheating husband Gil before her disappearance. The author is one of the few writers who are able to make this style work, artfully weaving Ingrid’s recollections and musings into the storyline without sacrificing either the flow of the novel or its cohesiveness. I absolutely loved Ingrid’s voice, which tells the sad tale of the steady erosion of innocence by the damaging dynamics of a dysfunctional relationship. In her first letter, she remembers her 20-year old self, all smiles, twirling skirts and innocence, on the day she first lays eyes on Gil, a charismatic university professor twice her age with a reputation of drinking and womanising. Inevitably drawn to his dangerous handsomeness, like a moth to the flame, Ingrid chooses a path that will totally consume her, change her life and ultimately destroy her.

In the present, we get to know Flora, a free-spirited girl in her early twenties, who is summoned back to her childhood home after her father has suffered an accident. Again, the author comes into her own, exploring the complex dynamics of the Coleman family – Flora, her older sister Nanette and her dying father Gil, all thrown together one last time in the dilapidated “Swimming Pavilion”. By weaving Flora’s reality together with Ingrid’s recollections of the past, we are able to glimpse the different realities of each individual family member. Whilst Nanette , as the older, sensible girl, has a good grasp of her father’s shortcomings as head of family and husband, Flora has been sheltered from the harsh realities of this dysfunctional family, and still adores her ageing father as the champion of her childhood.  

“Oh Flora, there are so many things you conveniently remember wrong. Sometimes I wonder if you were living in the same house as Mum and me.”

And whilst Nanette has long given up her mother for dead, Flora still has hope that one day she will walk through the doors of the Swimming Pavilion as if nothing has ever happened.

The setting is stunning and befitting this unusual family, and the author’s lyrical writing evokes the wild and untamed coastline perfectly. I had vivid mental images of the rock “Old Smoker” and loved Ingrid’s descriptions of swimming there, her one escape from her unhappy life. 

“Under the surface, the water boiled as if storm clouds were massing and dispersing at great speed, and I spiralled through them, a leaf in a whirlwind.” 

Swimming features strongly in both Ingrid’s and Flora’s lives, as an escape from reality, a healing force, a way to get back to basics and beginnings.

All in all, Swimming Lessons is a beautifully drawn story about relationships, family and the sacrifices we make for love. The author’s exquisitely drawn characters and setting captured me from the very first page, and I could not tear myself away. Highly recommended!

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for providing me with a free electronic copy of this novel in exchange for an honest review. 

Book Review: THE END OF WINTER by T. D. Griggs

Title: The End of Winter
Author: T. D. Griggs
Read: October 2016


Synopsis (Goodreads):

Surgeon Michael Severin flies to disaster areas all over the world - floods, earthquakes, fires. He is good at his work, courageous and skilled - a natural rescuer.

But at what cost to himself and those he loves? Returning early from an assignment he finds his wife Caitlin dying from a brutal assault in their London home. His world shattered, Severin sets out to unravel the tangled skein of events which led to the tragedy.

He finds more questions than answers. And he is forced to confront the biggest question of all: do you ever really know the one you love?

My thoughts:

What a wonderful treat this novel turned out to be! Purchased as a kindle special deal, it gave me many hours of pleasure reading, and I am very glad I chanced upon it whilst browsing Amazon. The End of Winter is a haunting tale of love, grief, loss and the effects one person’s actions can have on the lives of many different people, packaged in a slowly unfolding murder-mystery. Griggs tells his story through the eyes of an interesting protagonist, MSF surgeon Michael Severin, a man who has dedicated his life to saving others. Like many of his kind, Michael threw himself into his rescuer role as a means to assuage his own guilt over a tragedy in his past, only to find that it has now become an integral part of his personality he cannot easily let go. I found Michael to be a fascinating, well-rounded character, whose melancholy musings over how he ultimately may be to blame for his wife’s death occasionally threw up doubts about his reliability as a narrator, which added to the mystery. The cast of supporting characters were all very well developed, adding an interesting mix of diverse personalities from different social classes into the mix, each with their own crosses to bear and their own potential motives for the crime committed. As Michael sets out to solve the mystery, the story becomes so much more than just a crime novel, but an exploration of the dynamics that drive a relationship, redemption for decisions made and the ability to let go of the past.

The End of Winter may well be one of my favourite murder-mysteries I have read this year, with its evocative voice still haunting me after the last page has been turned. Highly recommended to readers who enjoy a slower paced mystery that focuses on the human psyche and the forces driving our actions, decisions and relationships. 

Book Review: HISTORY OF WOLVES by Emily Fridlund

Title: History of Wolves
Author: Emily Fridlund
Publisher: Grove Atlantic
Read: October 2016
Expected publication: 3 January 2017



Synopsis (Goodreads):

Linda has an idiosyncratic home life: her parents live in abandoned commune cabins in northern Minnesota and are hanging on to the last vestiges of a faded counter-culture world. The kids at school call her 'Freak', or 'Commie'. She is an outsider in all things. Her understanding of the world comes from her observations at school, where her teacher is accused of possessing child pornography, and from watching the seemingly ordinary life of a family she babysits for. Yet while the accusation against the teacher is perhaps more innocent than it seemed at first, the ordinary family turns out to be more complicated. As Linda insinuates her way into the family's orbit, she realises they are hiding something. If she tells the truth, she will lose the normal family life she is beginning to enjoy with them; but if she doesn't, their son may die.

Superbly-paced and beautifully written, HISTORY OF WOLVES is an extraordinary debut novel about guilt, innocence, negligence, well-meaning belief and the death of a child.

My thoughts:

The teenage years are difficult for most of us, but 15-year-old Madeline (aka Linda, aka Mattie) finds it even harder to fit in than other girls in her peer group. Having been brought up in a commune by ageing hippies, she now lives with the people she calls Mum and Dad in a cabin on the shores of a lake in a remote wilderness area of Minnesota. At times, she even questions whether these people are her real parents, as she has no concrete memories of ever belonging to anyone in particular in the commune, but drifting through the hands of many different people and sharing the house with various  other children, all of who have long drifted away. Perhaps it is this unusual upbringing that makes Madeline associate more with wild animals than people, roaming the wild woods in her free time and watching people’s behaviours with the fascination of an outsider. And whilst she has a good grasp on the behaviour of wild creatures, such as wolves, humans are much harder to understand. Take Mr Grierson, her new history teacher, who is being accused of seducing a 15-year old girl, the beautiful mysterious Lily who has been the closest thing to a friend Madeline has ever had at school. In the midst of trying to come to terms with this evolving scandal, a new family moves into the cabin across the lake, and Madeline starts babysitting their 4-year old Paul after school, becoming part of the family. But the happy family picture may be hiding an ugly truth that will shape Madeline’s life in ways she cannot foresee ...

History of Wolves is a haunting and somewhat disturbing coming of age story which soon caught me up in its descriptive prose. It easily evokes images of a wild young girl on the cusp of womanhood roaming the forests, peering through the windows of strangers, yearning to be let inside and be loved. Madeline is a fascinating and engaging protagonist, and whilst she always holds the reader at arms’ length, I wanted to be part of her world. Amongst the descriptions of a wild and beautiful land lies the harshness of living outside the grid, the cold and dark winter nights without adequate heating or power, without a car to get to town, wearing clothes stitched from old rags as there is no money to buy such luxury as new ones. Without the usual trappings of our modern era, Madeline spends her after-school hours roaming amongst the wild creatures she identifies with, time stretching in endless loops into the distant horizon.

With the arrival of Patra, Leo and Paul Gardner, the story takes on a more sinister, haunting note, and it is clear that nothing good can come out of the relationship. I wished that the author had not revealed halfway through the book what fate awaited the family, as this mystery kept me reading on avidly and, once revealed, spoiled the journey a bit for me. I would have preferred to savour the journey to the inevitable ending, slowly unpeeling the layers of events as they unfolded rather than jumping the timeline and being allowed a peek at the events that would follow. That, and the strange jumbling of timelines are my biggest gripe with the story, which I otherwise savoured in all its strangeness and with the fascination of a stranger looking into Madeline’s life, so alien from my own. As it was, I enjoyed the first half of the book much more than the later parts, and the ending left me puzzled and a bit unsatisfied, having expected some sort of consolidation of earlier loose ends.  However, I loved Fridlund’s lyrical prose and the images she conjured up so effortlessly, even though some of the characters left me with a sense of dread and the type of prickly sensation on my skin only a hot shower can wash away. All in all, a mixed bag for me for the reasons mentioned, but I have no hesitation in picking up another novel from the author in future. 

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for providing me with a free electronic copy of this novel in exchange for an honest review. 

Book Review: THE GIRLS by Emma Cline

Title: The Girls
Author: Emma Cline
Publisher: Random House UK, Vintage Publishing
Read: October 2016


Synopsis (Goodreads):

Northern California, during the violent end of the 1960s. At the start of summer, a lonely and thoughtful teenager, Evie Boyd, sees a group of girls in the park, and is immediately caught by their freedom, their careless dress, their dangerous aura of abandon. Soon, Evie is in thrall to Suzanne, a mesmerizing older girl, and is drawn into the circle of a soon-to-be infamous cult and the man who is its charismatic leader. Hidden in the hills, their sprawling ranch is eerie and run down, but to Evie, it is exotic, thrilling, charged—a place where she feels desperate to be accepted. As she spends more time away from her mother and the rhythms of her daily life, and as her obsession with Suzanne intensifies, Evie does not realize she is coming closer and closer to unthinkable violence, and to that moment in a girl’s life when everything can go horribly wrong.

My thoughts:

The Girls explores a mysterious and intriguing phenomenon of the human psyche – what makes someone susceptible to being drawn into a cult, leaving all they have ever held dear behind and pledging loyalty to its leader and members, even going as far as killing for them? It is instantly obvious that young Evie is particularly vulnerable to predators. Her home life is far from happy, with her parents divorced and her mother more interested in a parade of different boyfriends than her own daughter. She doesn’t fit in well at school, and is becoming bored with hanging out with her best – and only – friend. When she encounters the mysterious, beautiful and fearless Suzanne, she is instantly drawn to her, as the older girl represent everything that Evie has never been: strong, independent, uninhibited and free to live her life whichever way she chooses. Suzanne introduces her to her cult family and its charismatic leader, Russel, and again it is obvious why Evie is excited by her new friends. Apart from the poverty, the squalor and the lack of privacy, life on the ranch has that element of danger and thrill Evie has been missing in her own life. Cline has done a great job describing Evie’s “golden summer” on the ranch, her emotional high, her refusal to see the truth in front of her eyes. Until the day something happens that will open Evie’s eyes to the truth, the hidden menace, the realisation that she has given her trust to a devil in disguise. Stripped bare of her rose tinted glasses Evie realises that her life has taken a wrong turn, descended into dangerous waters she is not sure she can escape from.

Cline’s descriptive writing transported me effortlessly into the long gone era of the 60’s, exploring not the happy flower-power atmosphere that is often portrayed in other novels of the time but an altogether darker side. Her casual observations of Russell, his followers and their habitat were spot-on, and as readers we were able to see the cracks forming long before Evie does. Because of this, there is an ever-present atmosphere of menace and danger connected to the cult, at times downright creepy. One scene for some reason stuck with me long after I had finished reading – that of a naked toddler playing in the filth, defecating wherever he wants, feral as a wild animal. It embodied the longing for freedom as well as its hidden dangers, that of losing our civilised, controlled, human side that makes us function in society. However, for me a true understanding of Russell’s motives and his hold over the girls was lacking, and I found him a bit of an elusive character and not one I would have thought attractive or charismatic enough to wield such power. I would have loved to have this aspect explored a bit deeper to leave a bigger emotional impact. As it was, the killings lacked a sufficiently powerful motive for me and came a bit out of left field.

I found The Girls a fascinating albeit not always particularly enjoyable read, due to its somewhat sinister theme. All in all, this was a good but not great read for me. I loved Cline’s writing style and her keen observations and will make sure to look up her future novels.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for providing me with a free electronic copy of this novel in exchange for an honest review.