This is my first Lisa Jewell book and I have to say I was thoroughly engrossed from beginning to end. Even when I wasn't quite sure what was going on with characters and timelines, I WANTED to keep going.

It's interesting, because this book is a case of nothing truly shocking me, but I appreciated the way the story was crafted so much that I didn't care about the lack of real twists. There are a couple of reveals that I felt were guessable if you were paying attention, but I didn't care. I was all in.

I have always had a fascination with the type of person who would let themselves and their families get sucked into a cult, which is basically what happens in this book. Some of the characters try to downplay that word, but if it looks like a cult and represses freedoms like a cult...it is a cult. Call it whatever you want, but it's a cult.

Anyway, I thought the exploration of this was done really well. It shows how at first, the ideas of a cult leader don't seem all that extreme. He (because it's almost always a man in charge of these things) may even have decent reasons and justifications for his demands on his followers. He grooms them to accept his domineering ways, continually moving the line further and further as he takes away more and more of his followers freedoms and belongings, until they rely completely on him to 'provide' for them. It's not until it's too late that they realize that they've given up their own personhood to foster the ego of a maniac, if they ever do realize it.

Where this book really succeeds is to show us all of this through the eyes of one of the children being kept captive and the effect it has on him. The result is seriously disturbing, and I couldn't help feeling sorry for him, even though he ends up having serious issues of his own and being largely unreliable in his version of events.

I don't know if I would classify this as a straight-up 'thriller' because to me it's more of an examination of a seriously dysfunctional family and how the actions and choices of parents can have lasting and detrimental consequences on their children and subsequent generations. Where it loses a star from me is that I wasn't exactly shocked by any of the events. I had an idea of where the story was heading, and it unfolded in pretty much the way I expected. But that being said, it's creepy as hell and I would highly recommend.


I really enjoyed this book and will read more again from this author.