CBR17 Book 5: "Stargate - en julefortelling" (Brightly Shining) by Ingvild H. Rishøi

Page count: 144 pages

Audiobook length: 2 hrs 38 mins

Rating: 3 stars

Nowhere Book Bingo 25: Local author (the story takes place about 15 minutes from where I work)

It is impossible for me to review this book without spoiling parts of it, so if you don't want to know how it ends, and why I can't rate this book higher, skip the paragraphs I've highlighted. 

Ten-year-old Ronja and her sixteen-year-old sister Melissa are used to disappointments, living alone with a father who only occasionally sobers up long enough to hold down a job for a month or two. They're used to pretending they've forgotten their food at home and taking care of themselves. Close to Christmas, it looks like this year, their luck may change when their dad gets a job selling Christmas trees. Sadly, it doesn't take long before he returns to the local pubs and Melissa takes the job instead (at much less pay, of course). Since Ronja ends up spending her afternoons near her sister, she's soon recruited to look pitiful and round up customers for Christmas wreaths and decorative pine branches, for an added share of the profits. While the owner of the stand seems ok with turning a blind eye to Melissa's being barely old enough to work, he's not going to risk his business by outright using child labour, so every time he comes around for an inspection, Ronja has to make herself scarce.

SPOILERS START HERE:

Ingvild H. Rishøi wrote this Christmas novella back in 2021, and while it sold well, it didn't become an instant sell-out until it was translated into English. After singer Dua Lipa raved about it in her Instagram stories and said she'd be buying it as a Christmas present for several loved ones, and then Oprah Winfrey included it among her best books of 2024. Since the Norwegian press wrote enthusiastically about this (as they do about any Norwegian thing that becomes popular internationally), suddenly bookshops all over Norway kept selling out their copies, and the book needed to be reprinted more than once. Having now listened to the audiobook, narrated by the author herself, I can see why it's become very popular. I was mentally bracing myself for the book because I have a hard time reading about alcoholic parents (my own father having been one until I was ten - now he hasn't drunk a drop for 35 years), and if I'd been paying attention more closely, the multiple mentions of H.C. Andersen's The Little Match Girl throughout should have given me an idea of what to expect. I read for escapism, and to feel good, and am in no way a fan of books with sad and tear-jerking endings. I keep seeing the plot of this book described as poignant and heart-warming, and I don't see what's heart-warming about dead kids. 

Yes, it's lovely when for a brief while, the girls appear to be making enough money to possibly have a proper Christmas (even though Melissa has to work something like 10 hours a day, pretty much every second she's not in school). It's nice that their elderly neighbour comes to support Ronja during her school's Christmas concert and pretends to be her grandfather so the mean girls can't snipe at her. But just before Christmas, everything starts going horribly wrong. Their almost constantly drunk dad has dragged his drinking buddies home with him, Ronja is badly sick with a fever, the supportive neighbour is away, and the owner of the Christmas tree stand has discovered that Melissa and the other employee have been making money on the side, so fires them without paying them a dime. The writer doesn't straight-out say that the girls die while curled up under a Christmas tree in a massive winter storm, but them waking up in a magical forest just a short, idyllic walk from the cabin they've kept dreaming about throughout the story certainly seems like some "reunited with grandmother" bullshit while the little Match Girl freezes to death on a Danish street corner.

SPOILERS END HERE

I'm very glad that something from Norway that isn't dark and grisly crime fiction is becoming a publishing success and wish the author nothing but good luck, but this story was not for me. They've apparently turned it into a movie, being released at the end of October this year (just in time for people to be depressed while going to the cinema too), so I have no doubt the book will keep selling. 

Judging a book by its cover: The cover of the edition my co-worker lent me was just a plain red book with title and author name in gold, accompanied by a Christmas tree topped by a star. The English version seems to feature a snow-covered tree in a winter landscape, which doesn't exactly convey the tone of the story. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

CBR16 Book 19: "En enda hemlighet" (Falling) by Simona Arhnstedt

Page count: 509 pages

Rating: 4 stars

The readers met both the protagonists in this novel briefly in the first book in the series, En enda natt, which is also where they first ran into each other. 

At the beginning of this book, idealistic doctor Isobel Sørensen is angry and stressed because the organisation she works for most of the year, Medpax, is struggling for funds, and she's becoming convinced that it's her fault. On the previous occasions when she has run into Alexander de la Grip and he's tried to flirt with her (he seems to attempt to charm and flirt with every woman he meets), she has been very rudely dismissive of him. Now she's worried that the pampered playboy has decided to withdraw the annual contribution he used to give Medpax. Her boss doesn't really care what reasons Isobel might have for disliking Alexander, or frankly whether he's the devil himself. She orders Isobel to arrange a meeting with him, and be polite, pleasant and make sure he starts donating money again. 

As it turns out, Alexander de la Grip has not stopped the money because he feels insulted or snubbed by Isobel, he's just been dealing with his personal demons by trying to drown them in alcohol and casual sex, and he hasn't been monitoring his many business ventures very well for the past six months to a year. He's rather amused at Isobel's sudden change in behaviour towards him. He promises to make sure his money people start paying the organization again, and tempts Isobel to go on a date with him by promising an additional (ridiculously large) donation. 

Once Alexander decides to clean up his life and make something of himself to be worthy of Isobel, he does so very quickly indeed. Once Isobel actually gives him the time of day and starts talking to him, she discovers that her snap judgements of him have been unfair, and that there is a lot more to Alexander than his looks, wealth and seeming carelessness. Once she starts uncovering the real man, she can't help but be drawn to him. But Alexander isn't the only one with emotional baggage, and strong mutual physical attraction isn't going to be enough for them to build a lasting relationship. 

As I'm sure you can tell from my rather uninspired plot summary, there is a lot of 'come here, go away' (thanks, Mrs. J) in this book, and both protagonists have a lot of emotional baggage that makes it difficult for them to trust, commit, or believe themselves worthy of love. 

Alexander deals with his terrible parents' coldness by being an international playboy/manwhore and being seen publicly drunk in the press as often as possible, preferably with one or two socialite bimbos surrounding him. Nevertheless, he is also revealed to be extremely intelligent, able to read up and learn about pretty much any subject very quickly when he sets his mind to it. He's also apparently a gazillionaire, having invested early in tech and app development, not to mention his best friend's restaurant ventures, and now he can just keep raking in cash (and spending it . Due to his many trust issues, and his self-esteem issues, he doesn't want anyone to know about this side of him, not even his sister whom he loves and respects, and certainly not the clever doctor he's falling for. Just like no one suspects charming and slightly indifferent to anything serious billionaire Bruce Wayne of being dour vigilante Batman, absolutely no one would suspect international playboy Alexander de la Grip of being extremely clever and a secret philantropist. 

Isobel has severe mommy issues, having been raised by her grandmother while her narcissistic mother and withholding father were off doing their own things. Since both her grandfather and her mother were skilled doctors who devoted their lives to foreign aid work and rescue operations in far-flung places, Isobel was never going to be able to choose another career, but nevertheless defied her mother by joining MSF and working for a pittance most of the time, doing a lot less of the schmoozing with rich people to collect funds and a lot more of traveling to dangerous places to provide medical assistance to those who have nothing. She also secretly dreams of kinky things like BDSM, but feels like a freak for wanting what seems to be fairly low-level kink stuff. Being tied up and spanked isn't that far off the vanilla path, but from her reluctance to share her fantasies, you'd think she wanted something much more unusual. 

This book is long and meandering and also deals with Alexander's depressed older brother's atonement for the bad shit he did as a teenager and his possible redemption. He is falling in love with his family's former cleaning lady, who also happens to be much younger than him and a very hard-working immigrant, so there's an age gap and a massive class difference to consider. Åsa and Michel, who spent most of the last novel avoiding one another before suddenly realising their feelings for one another towards the end, are now getting married in a massive society wedding in Stockholm (Alexander brings Isobel as his date). We also get to see more of Natalia and David, and what seems to be their ridiculously happy home life. This book is over 500 pages long, and could have benefitted from an editor to trim some storylines. 

Spoiler! Skip this paragraph if you want to remain unspoiled

What this text certainly did not need was a last-minute (like last 40 pages or so) kidnapping drama with Isobel in danger and Alexander throwing tons of money at mercenaries to get her rescued (and getting himself shot in the process). Not sure that was the best way to resolve their final act breakup.

End spoiler

This is my second Arhnstedt novel, and I'm enjoying it. There's only one book left in this series, and it seems to focus on the security expert who helps Alexander towards the end of the book (and who's believed to be dead by everyone), so it's going to be interesting to see how that plays out.

Judging a book by its cover: While the green colour of the dress is lovely and the model has a wealth of red hair that makes it obvious that this is supposed to be Isobel, I hate the partially-cropped head view, and there's something about the torso on the woman that just looks awkward to me. Not sure why. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read 

CBR15 Book 23: "Three Little Words" by Jenny Holiday

Page count: 369 pages

Rating: 3.5 stars

CBR15 Bingo: Bodies Bodies (self-esteem issues, eating disorder)

15-word review: International supermodel Gia has an eating disorder, but eats when restaurant owner Bennet feeds her. 

Longer review: Gia Gallo is used to travelling in her job as a globe-trotting fashion model. Recently, she struggles with the fact that she doesn't fit into the teeny tiny sizes of the clothes she's supposed to model, and she's not really sure if she's not outgrown the whole industry, both in body size and motivation-wise. Having never been in anything outside of the fashion world, however, she doesn't really feel like she would be qualified for anything else if she were to retire. The pressures of her job are causing her to have massively disordered eating. Deep down she knows it's a problem, but she doesn't really want to own up to it, and she's certainly not ready for anyone else to find out, especially not her best friends.

One of those best friends, Wendy, is getting married in Florida in six days. Gia has Wendy's late mother's wedding dress and needs to get to Florida in time to have the dress altered before the ceremony. Unfortunately, she's stuck in New York in a snowstorm, and no matter how much she threatens or pleads with airline staff, is she getting out of there by air. It just so happens that the best man for the wedding, restaurant owner and chef Bennett Buchanan is also stuck in the city, with the wedding rings, and he gets the last rental car but offers to let her come along for the road trip if she dials down her fashion diva behaviour. 

Because the weather is decidedly not on their side, Bennett and Gia decide to drive all the way to Florida. They fight their obvious attraction for one another, because Gia is only interested in a short-term fling, while Bennett only doesn't do casual hook-ups. Their differing outlook on relationships doesn't keep them from jumping one another for too long, though. As their road trip progresses and they get to know each other better, it also becomes very obvious to Bennet that Gia has an eating disorder, but she never seems to refuse food as long as he's the one cooking it for her. He tries to encourage her to open up to her friends about her troubles, while she helps him get more comfortable with his past and his relationship with his family. 

This is the third and final of the Bridesmaids Behaving Badly series, and by the end of it, all three friends introduced over the course of the series end up married. I enjoy Holiday's books, although none of them have impressed me enough to rate five stars yet. She's not on the 'buy at full price', and certainly not on the extremely rare 'buy in pre-order as soon as it becomes available' list, but I will keep picking up her book on sale.

Judging a book by its cover: This cover is perfectly fine, but since Gia has her hair dyed for the majority of the book, I really think the cover model's hair should have reflected that. I'm sure it's possible to do that sort of thing in editing after the photo is taken, so the model wouldn't even have had to dye her hair for real. 

CBR15 Book 6: "The Duke Undone" by Joanna Lowell

Page count: 384 pages

Rating: 3 stars

Lucy Coover is on her way to her painting class at the Royal Academy one morning when she stumbles across a body in an alley. The man is completely naked, and she assumes he's been the victim of a crime. Then she realises he's breathing, so he seems to only be dead drunk. As a female art student, Lucy is fascinated by human anatomy but is also not allowed to ever attend life drawing classes at the Academy. She's late for class but also makes sure to get a good eyeful. This might be her only chance to ever study a naked man up close.

Several months later, Anthony Philby, the Duke of Weston is confronted in his office by a furious man pointing a gun at him. The man is convinced that the duke has had an affair with his wife, despite Anthony's vehement claims that he's never even heard of the woman. Because the angry man is a terrible shot, Anthony escapes with nothing but a nick on the arm, but shooting a duke is nevertheless a serious enough crime that he's able to pressure the man to show him his alleged proof, which certainly looks extremely damning. The mythological figure depicted in the painting, purchased by the man's wife, is clearly the duke of Weston's extremely naked form. Of course, Anthony has never posed nude for a painting and has no idea how this image could have been captured. The existence of the painting were it to come to light, would spell out inevitable scandal, something Anthony cannot afford.

Anthony's life has been plagued by controversy and scandal. He was originally the second son, and never meant to inherit the title.  However, after Anthony's brother died while sinking a stolen barge, accompanied by a young sex worker, after a very public drunken escapade, his father had no choice but to accept him as the new heir. Anthony's brother was known for his utterly unhinged and scandalous behaviour, he rebelled against all of their father's constraints and delighted in causing outrageous scenes and bringing negative attention to the family.  The children's mother was from Greece, extremely beautiful and extroverted, and exuberant. While Anthony was still a teenager, his father claimed their mother had grown promiscuous and hysterical and had her committed to an insane asylum, where she fell into a depression and committed suicide. Throughout his childhood and adolescence, Anthony ended up in fistfights defending his mother's honour. Additionally, while Anthony was stationed in India as a soldier, his younger sister Effie ran away with a circus performer and was promptly disowned by their father as a result. Now no one has heard from her in years.

All of these things mean that when the former duke died, he made sure to write several very unusual provisions into his will. While Anthony inherited the dukedom of Weston immediately after his father's death, all of the money and property associated with the title were tied up in a complicated trust, meant to control and curtail Anthony's behaviour. Unless Anthony lives a life of sobriety and moderation, avoiding even the merest hint of a scandal until his thirtieth birthday, he will not gain control of his money and estates and remain under the thumb of his father's friend and advisor, Mr Yardley, who seems more than happy to continue his guardianship. The nude painting and accusations of adultery would certainly count as scandalous and ruin any chances Anthony has of escaping his tyrannical father's control from beyond the grave. 

Anthony goes to the Royal Academy to track down the mysterious L. Coover and is surprised to find that the painter is a young lady. He's not sure how she could possibly have seen him naked, and therefore mistakenly thinks she moonlights as a prostitute when not taking painting classes. Lucy instead reveals that she found him dead drunk in an alley and promises that the painting he saw was the only one she ever made of him. Anthony demands that she give him all her notes and sketches, or he'll get her thrown out of the Academy. It seems as if the two might never have to meet again after that, only Lucy discovers that the area of Shoreditch where she and her seamstress aunt live is scheduled to be demolished shortly, and the only powerful man she knows is Anthony. She shows up at his London townhouse and demands that he use whatever influence he has to try to persuade the city officials in charge of the decision to change their minds. In return, Anthony asks her to search for his missing sister, Effie, who he's very worried about.

Of course, now that they're seeing each other regularly, there's bound to be an attraction between them. However, Lucy discovers that to rebel against his father's strict rules, Anthony takes every chance he gets to get drunk in secret, hiding it from his servants and Yardley. Lucy's father was an alcoholic and she remembers all too well how devastating his drunkenness was for her and her mother. She's never going to let herself fall for an alcoholic. There's also the fact that she's an orphan from Shoreditch, while he's the duke of Weston. A happy ending for them isn't exactly in the cards.

There is a lot to like about this book, but also quite a few things that took me out of the story. As I've seen pointed out in a lot of reviews, the provisions left in Anthony's father's will, where he wouldn't be able to touch any of the money from his inheritance or estates until he turned thirty, or even beyond if he was involved in any scandals, just isn't something that could ever have happened and the complications around this plot strand just keep getting more and more ridiculous as the story progresses. Obviously, ridiculous will demands are frequently a trope in historical romance, but this one takes things a bit too far. 

As the daughter of an alcoholic myself (my father stopped drinking when I was nine, and hasn't drunk a drop since, so it could have been a lot worse for me growing up) I have a really hard time sympathising with characters with severe substance abuse problems that they refuse to deal with. I found the A Star is Born remake with Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper almost insufferable to watch because I could not for a second emphasise with Cooper's character, and Lady Gaga's character should have gotten far far away from him as soon as she could. Similarly here, I found Anthony's habitual drinking, seemingly a direct result of him trying to spite his already dead father, rather immature and not at all an attractive character trait in what was supposed to be a romance hero. I'm sure it was meant to make him more tragic, but this misfired for me.

The novel also takes a turn for the rather melodramatic in the final third or so of the novel. Lucy does in fact manage to track down Effie, Anthony's missing sister, eventually but the details of her whereabouts for the past several years and who put her there and why, as well as the motivations of the villain of the piece just made me roll my eyes. 

Lowell has a really good turn of phrase, and I liked her more unusual choice of heroine (and several of Lucy's friends at the Academy), but I doubt I will be re-visiting this book in the future, and I feel no particular need to read the next book in the series. 

Judging a book by its cover: The delicate flowers on the cover and the whimsical silhouettes, make this look like a much more frothy and light-hearted novel than it actually is. There's a lot of dark subject matter being discussed in this novel, and this cover might mislead a reader into thinking they're going to get an undemanding romp, rather than a hero with PTSD, substance abuse problems, and a truly sordid family history. 

Crossposted on Cannonball Read

#CBR11 Book 76: "Sangen om en brukket nese (The Ballad of a Broken Nose)" by Arne Svingen

Page count: 207 pages
Rating: 4.5 stars

Bart is about to turn thirteen. He's named after Bart Simpson, because it seems his mother wanted him to be tough and clever and able to handle himself. This is also why she's signed him up for boxing lessons. He dutifully  goes to practise several times a week, and one of these days, he may actually start hitting. His boxing coach suggests he may want to try out for some other sport, which Bart can understand, as except for having a pretty good guard, Bart is pretty dreadful at boxing. He refuses to give up, however.

What Bart is actually rather excellent at is opera singing. The downside is that he can only sing well without an audience. This means he mostly sings locked in his tiny bathroom, since Bart lives alone with his morbidly obese, mostly unemployed mother (who is clearly an alcoholic) in a tiny one-room flat, where privacy isn't easy to come by. Bart and his mother live in an old building where the hallway floors are covered in old rubbish, broken syringes and other unpleasant things that make it very clear that Bart can never actually make any close friends, because God forbid one of them ever wanted to come round to his after school one day. He's not exactly a bullying victim, but pretty firmly on one of the lower rungs of the social ladder.

Bart's life takes a turn for the more dramatic when Ada, the pretty, popular and persistent girl he sits next to at school (it's not that she likes Bart THAT way, she has a boyfriend in another town, besides, she's so well-liked and popular their differing social statuses pretty much span a galaxy) figures out that not only does Bart enjoy listening to opera, but he sings it as well. Since he's unable to sing in front of others, he makes her a recording, but forgets to make her promise not to share it with anyone else. It turns out that Ada is pretty bad at keeping secrets. First, she shares the recording with the entire class, and Bart's enthusiastic teacher won't stop nagging until he agrees to perform at the end of year school performance. Then, she unexpectedly shows up on his doorstep and stays for dinner. Sadly, the next day, most of the school knows that Bart lives in a terrible wreck of a building and his mother is an overweight shut-in.

Then, on the very day he turns thirteen, Bart wakes to find his grandmother bearing sad news. His mother, who went out the evening before, has been hospitalised and needs an operation to get better. His grandmother will have to stay with him until his mother recovers. It's at this point Bart break down and tells his grandmother the truth (which she's been pretty aware of for a long time) about his rather dismal living situation, and having unburdened himself, immediately feels like things might actually start looking up. Ada keeps wanting to spend time with him, trying to figure out ways to help him overcome his stage fright (including managing to sneak him into the hotel room of his music idol, Bryn Terfel, when the opera singer is in Oslo about to perform). Bart may even have managed to track down the man who might be his father, after all these years.

This is a book my colleagues and I decided to read out loud to our eighth graders this term. I have read other books by Arne Svingen, a hugely popular YA and middle grade Norwegian author before, but this book is by far my favourite. It's impossible not to love Bart fiercely, because he stays so achingly optimistic despite all the sad and horrible things in life. His mother is dangerously obese, clearly partially disabled, barely works and comes home drunk several nights a week. They live in a tiny, crowded one-room flat in a building full of junkies and society low lifes. He makes very sure to keep everyone at school at a safe distance, desperate to hide his dismal home situation.

Bart and his mother constantly lie to his grandmother about the true state of affairs, claiming his mother has a steady job and healthy finances. His mother refuses to take any handouts from the grandmother. Opera singing is his secret escape, but after just a few weeks of getting closer to Ada, all his secrets are out in the open and unless he overcomes his stage fright and puts on the performance of a life time at the school performance, he'll go from anonymous nobody on the fringes of the school yard to favoured bullying victim for the whole school.

Bart spends much of his free time searching the web for the father he never met. Unfortunately, all his mother would tell him is that the man is called John Jones, and that he's an American. It's obvious that his parents didn't spend long together, and naturally, there are a LOT of search results for such a common name. However, Bart steadfastly keeps searching, occasionally sending off e-mail enquiries in the hopes that THIS time, he's found the right man, the John Jones who is missing his Norwegian teenage son.

As someone who grew up with an alcoholic father (who thankfully gave up drinking more than 30 years ago now), parts of this book hit very close to home for me, and I had to actually read the last few pages of the book to assure myself that everything was going to turn out well in the end. Very perceptively, one of my students observed yesterday, when I was asking them how they thought the story would continue and end (we're now about halfway through), that the book has to end on a happy note, because what we've read so far, has been really rather sad and bittersweet and the story won't work unless things turn around and get better for Bart in the second half of the story. While I have read the whole book, my class as of yet have not, and I thought that was a very mature (and entirely correct) observation, which shows this kid has a very good grasp of how narratives are structured. I'm honestly not sure I was as insightful a reader (or in his case, listener) when I was in my early teens.

All the way throughout reading this book, I kept comparing it to About a Boy by Nick Hornby. I remember being surprised at how much darker and more serious the book was to the delightful movie adaptation. Bart, unlike the Marcus of the book (and film) doesn't befriend someone as cool as Will (Hugh Grant's character), although he does strike up a friendship with one of the heroin addicts who live in his building, and who mobilises many of the fellow residents to show up and take part in a day of volunteering to clean up the hallways and back yard of the building in honour of Bart's birthday. They even get him a bike (with the serial number neatly filed away) and a brand new bike lock they actually paid money for(!). It's not exactly the same as the expensive trainers Will gifts Marcus, but in many ways, a lot more touching.

I'm so glad we decided to read this to the students this term, and I'm also happy that my class seems to mostly be enjoying the book as much as I do. This book has now been translated into a number of different languages and has been nominated for multiple awards, both in Norway and internationally. So if you're looking for a quirky, bittersweet and very heartwarming read, I can very much recommend this one.

Judging a book by its cover: This book comes with several different covers, but this is the one we use on one of the editions we're reading to the pupils in y school, and thus seemed appropriate. The boxing gloves and the microphone are both very relevant to the plot, and nothing on the cover gives too much away about the story.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR8 Book 108: "The Girl on the Train" by Paula Hawkins

Page count: 336 pages
Rating: 3.5 stars

Rachel, trying to drown the sorrows of her recent divorce in alcohol and denial travels to London on the train every morning and back to the suburb where she shares a flat with an old friend in the evenings. As she passes the area where she used to live, she observes a seemingly golden couple and makes up a fantasy narrative about their life to comfort herself in her loneliness. She's named them Jess and Jason and believes them to have a perfect relationship, in contrast to her miserable life, post failed-marriage.

One day, she sees "Jess" kissing a man who is most certainly not "Jason" in the garden, and this causes Rachel to have a minor breakdown. Waking up after a particularly epic drinking binge, she has a cut on her head, several bruises and absolutely no memory of what happened, but she believes it may have involved her old street, and possibly seeking out her ex-husband. She also discovers from the news that Megan Hipwell, as "Jess" is really called, has disappeared.

Rachel knows (as everyone else) that the husband is always one of the main suspects in disappearance cases. She believes very strongly that "Jason", in reality Scott Hipwell, couldn't have hurt his wife. She's determined to notify the police about the strange man that she saw Megan with from the train. Due to her habitual drunkenness, Rachel's not really treated as a reliable witness by the police, further hampered by the harassment complaints made about her by her ex-husband's new girlfriend. Because she knows the police aren't taking her seriously, Rachel feels compelled to contact Scott as well, pretending to be a friend of Megan's. She needs him to know about the man Megan was seeing.

As she keeps returning to the area where she used to live, where Megan disappeared from, Rachel struggles to remember what happened to her on the night she has completely blacked out. She knows she was in the area the same night that Megan left her home - could she have seen or heard something that could help the case?

The Girl on the Train came out in early 2015 and has been reviewed a lot of times on the Cannonball Read already. I've seen it compared to Gone Girl in the press (really not a fair comparison at all) and the movie version starring Emily Blunt as Rachel is about to be released in cinemas. I put it on my TBR list when it came out, and have kept putting it off for various reasons. Now that the movie is right around the corner, I figured I should read it, so movie reviews didn't spoil the book for me. I didn't know that much about the details of the book, and probably wouldn't have chosen to read about a fairly broken woman, struggling with alcoholism and reconciling herself to a divorce in part caused by her involuntary infertility struggles, when I myself am trying to get over my own very recent failure at yet another IVF attempt. I had figured a mystery suspense novel would be a good break from the romances I normally read, where quite a lot of the books end with pregnancy and the heroines always seem to be frustratingly fertile. So this book, not the best choice to read right now.

I can only assume that The Girl on the Train has been frequently compared to Gone Girl because they both feature quite unlikable female protagonists, there is a disappearance in both books, suspense/mystery novels written by women. There are also unreliable narrators in each of the books, but having read both novels, the similarities are superficial at most, and when you get down to it, they are very different books within a genre. I'm not going to go into other ways in which they are different, as that would spoil the reading experience.

Much of the book is told from Rachel's POV, but due to her drinking, we cannot entirely trust her memories or narration. There are also sections from Megan's POV, which start more than a year before she goes missing. It gives the reader insight into her actual life, which is a lot less idyllic than Rachel's fantasy narrative. There are also some chapters from the POV of Rachel's rival, Anna, the woman her husband had an affair with, who now lives in her former house, with Rachel's ex-husband, raising their baby girl.

Rachel used to work in marketing, but lost her job after turning up to work drunk. She still goes back and forth into the city, so as to not alert her flat mate to the fact that she's unemployed. She's suffered drunken blackouts more than once, and while her ex-husband's cheating contributed to the dissolution of the marriage, Rachel's depression and increased drunkenness after the failed fertility treatments caused her to act violently and erratically and their marriage had no hopes of surviving. Rachel is still a bit obsessed with her ex-husband and the reason Anna reported her to the police is because she once showed up at their home and snatched up their baby while Anna was napping. In fact, after this episode, that increased Anna's anxiety about Rachel (who keeps calling and occasionally shows up to talk to her ex, Tom), was the reason she hired Megan as a babysitter for a time, although Megan quit from boredom after only a few weeks.

While the book is a bit slow to start (and I really didn't enjoy spending so much time in Rachel's drunken, self-pitying head), it builds the suspense nicely and gets more exciting as the story unfolds. I figured out the identity of the killer (this is not a spoiler, it's obvious from the very first page that Megan ends up dead) some time before it was revealed, but that may very well have been intentional. It certainly adds more to the tension when the reader knows more than the characters in the book, and just waits for them to catch up. The book didn't entirely work for me (but again, that could have been because it further exacerbated the pain of my own recent failure to conceive a child), and I found it a bit confusing in places. Nonetheless, I can see why the book has become so popular and I'm sure the movie will be entertaining.

Judging a book by its cover: As far as I can tell, the version I read, has the movie tie-in cover, which means it just features the movie poster on the front. A train in the background with one lit-up window, speed lines illustrating the speed of the moving train. Slight blurring of the font and the movie tag line underneath. I don't really care for tie-in covers, but it was what I got. I don't think this poster is what's going to sell the movie.

Crossposted on Cannonball Read.

#CBR5 Book 60. "Dare You To" by Katie McGarry

Page count: 479 pages
Rating: 4.5 stars

Dare You To is the sequel to Pushing the Limits, which I reviewed last year, but works fine on its own, and may even be better if you don't have any preconceived impressions of Beth from that book.

To say that Elizabeth "Beth" Risk has a sucky home life, would be an understatement. Beth's mum is an alcoholic and recreational drug user, with an abusive boyfriend. Yet Beth feels responsible for her father leaving them, years ago, and is willing to do whatever it takes to keep her mother out of jail, even if it means taking a beating now and again. Thanks to the help of her two best friends, Noah and Isaiah, she manages to stay mostly safe. Neither of the two boys think she should be protecting her mother the way she does. When Beth's mum smashes up her boyfriend's car, and Beth takes the blame for it, getting arrested so her mother doesn't violate her parole, the two foster care boys are relieved when Beth's uncle, Scott, arrives to bail her out of jail, and demands that she stay with him until she turns eighteen, even if it means they won't get to see her much anymore.

Scott is her father's younger brother, who knows exactly what sort of a dead beat Beth's father was. He left to become a baseball pro while Beth was still a little girl, and has just moved back into town with his wife. Unless Beth agrees to stay with him until she turns eighteen, and follow his rules, he'll make sure the police know all about Beth's mother and the things he found in her flat when he came looking for Beth. Defeated, Beth agrees, even though Scott's new wife is less than thrilled to have what she considers a severely messed up juvenile delinquent staying under her roof.

Ryan Stone is the local golden boy, whose baseball skills are likely to get him a career in the big leagues. Of course, most of the town don't know about the tensions he's experiencing at home, with his father shunning his older brother after he came out as gay, or that baseball may not be the only thing Ryan wants to focus on. His English teacher is pushing him to pursue his writing, and has even entered him into a big contest, but his father wants nothing to distract him from baseball games and showing off for talent scouts. He keeps his adrenaline up with constant dares, the hardest one in a while getting the phone number of a stand offish skater girl at Taco Bell. Imagine Ryan's surprise when the skater girl turns out to be the new girl in his school, and the niece of one of his baseball idols, Scott Risk? Of course, Beth still won't give him the time of day, and his friends up the dare from getting her phone number to getting her to agree to a date - but Ryan isn't worried. He never plays to lose, and he certainly intends to win this challenge.

Anyone who has read Pushing the Limits could be forgiven for thinking that Beth and Isaiah were clearly meant to end up together. McGarry even admits that when she was writing the first book, she fully intended them to become a couple. But things change, and never having been entirely convinced by their chemistry when they were supporting characters in Noah's book, I'm glad that McGarry changed her mind and developed new love interests for Beth and Isaiah (there's a sneak preview of Isaiah's book Crash Into You at the end of the book). While Isaiah is sweet, he never challenges or questions Beth, and he would certainly never push her out of her comfort zone.

Ryan is great. He's clearly so much more than your standard high school jock from the moment we meet him. While on the surface he has everything - looks, athletic skills, popularity, money - it's very obvious that he's desperately lonely after his beloved older brother left. He's clearly not really shared the true extent to his tense and uncomfortable home life after his father's autocratic decision to shun his eldest son with his closest friends. As well as being a star baseball player, he's apparently a great writer. He's strangely drawn to Beth from the first time they meet, and he's certainly not used to being outright rejected. At first, getting close to Beth is all about winning the dare, but the more time he spends with her, the more he realises that she's not actually what his first impressions, and the rumours about her, suggest.

Beth is fiercely loyal, even when that loyalty is undeserved and wholly misplaced. Her mother is an alcoholic and an addict, and Beth is the one who tries to make sure the bills are paid and they actually have food in the house. She feels that she cannot abandon her mother, as it's her fault that her father left them, even though he was a dead beat drug dealer, who would should clearly never have been allowed near women or kids. It's clear that Beth has taken beatings from her mother's abusive boyfriend more than once, just to deflect attention away from her mother. Noah and Isaiah try to keep her away from her home as much as possible, but they're foster kids, and don't exactly have the best resources. When her uncle Scott shows up, ready to swoop to the rescue after nearly a decade away, Beth just feels betrayed and she certainly doesn't want to give up her clothes and her friends and become someone she's not just because Scott has finally decided he can take care of her again.

Like in McGarry's last book, the chapters alternate between the protagonists' point of view, so you get to know both characters and their thoughts and emotions really well. It's a great way of making the reader sympathetic to the characters, and allows her to explore a situation from several angles. While I really liked McGarry's first book in the series, I enjoyed this one even more, possibly because while both Ryan and Beth's home lives were unpleasant and unenviable, they weren't as messed up as Echo's buried secrets. I'm very much looking forward to Isaiah's book, out in November, and will happily pay for it if I'm not lucky enough to get a NetGalley ARC the third time around.

This book was an ARC from Harlequin Australia, given to me through NetGalley. The book is on sale in hardcover and e-book, worldwide, now.