The Girls: The gripping Richard and Judy Book Club pick

Product Information

Single mom Alice finds a mysterious man sitting alone on a beach in the coastal town of Ridinghouse Bay. In some ways, this story is a little quirky, told from various POV’s, but also does a pretty good job of creating a feeling of unease, and building suspense at a steady pace, with a few very surprising twists thrown in along the way. When the book begins, Alice sees a stray man sitting on a bench next to her house. Due to her inquisitive nature, Alice wants why the man was sitting on the bench, while it was straining. However, Alice knows that she should stay out of it.

The book begins with the discovery of bones in the Thames River that is related to a 30-year-old cold case. The mystery itself is pretty decent and one that you really do have to wait until the end as the author made sure to insert more than one suspect into the story. The ending itself is not completely satisfying although it did not ruin the story for me or anything. I don't want to get into spoiler territory so I will just leave it at that. Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival. As she nears the shape, she can see it is a foot. She holds her breath deep inside her body and rounds the corner timorously.

Retailers:

Maya had good friends and she seemed to have a job that she enjoyed. The two were in love and she even got along with Adrian’s two ex-wives and their children. Mysterious, life-threatening injuries to a teenage girl cause previously close-knit neighborhood families to examine each other with concern and suspicion. The foot is attached to a person. Pip passes the beam from her mobile phone across the figure: a girl, half undressed. Shorts yanked down to her thighs, floral camisole top lifted above small naked breasts. Her hair is spread about her. Her face is a bloodied mass.

I so loved this book for the young people - who really drive the book. Even the adult mums are mostly motivated by what is happening with the children. And the children are the best characters. I think that may be why I am coming to love YAs and stories of teen friendship so much. Stories about 13 year olds seem so much more interesting and at least as mature as those about "adult" characters. And that seems just as true in real life as well. Most to the grown ups in today's world act mostly like 13 year olds. And real 13 year olds make so much better a job of being 13 than those in their mid-years or older who are running our world. Or trying to. Appropriately the most odious character here, Gordon the father-in-law of Adele, is the most elderly. He seems to have the maturity of a 3 year old and as the story has him returning to Africa, I hope he gets ebola. Ralph, a terrible artist, suddenly notices that he has feelings for his new flatmate Jem, the liveliest and most reasonable girl he has ever met.The catalyst in Lisa Jewell’s story are Clare, Grace and Pip. Clare’s husband is a schizophrenic who has just torched the family home. Striking out on their own, Clare and her two pre-pubescent daughters move into a flat. It is cramped by comparison with their previous surroundings, but there is a significantly redeeming feature – a large and very beautiful communal garden shared by the residents of Virginia Terrace, an elegant mix of flats and houses that surrounds the shared space. Her books, which have been translated into sixteen languages, have sold million copies across the globe. The once picturesque house is now impenetrable, filled with useless baubles, piles of hoarding and towers of newspapers. As she enters the house, Meg begins to recall her childhood days and how their house used to be one of the best in Cotswold. Meg also recalls one Easter Sunday where the extended Birds clan came together for Easter Egg hunts. What did I think?: I really enjoyed this book. It wasn't the heart-racing tale that I had possibly hoped, but it wasn't disappointing either. I see this one really being popular with many readers and I'm glad I was able to get my hands on it and share it with others early on. But what happens when a single mother of 2 teenage girls moves in to this tight-knit world? Everything is not as perfect as it seems, and slowly things go off kilter. Families with secrets, teenage love, green-eyed monsters, and an unresolved 15 year old murder of a young girl that was killed in this very garden make for a captivating story that I found hard to put down.

Clare and her 2 daughters move into a new home that shares a communal "garden" with other families. Things seem fine at first as they always do, but then things turn out to not be as fine as they seem. There are cliques, family secrets, jealousy, relationships changing upon the arrival of the new family, and a 15 year old murder mystery of another teenage girl. Lisa Jewell sure knows how to ramp up the suspense – and how to throw out a red herring or five or ten! Josie’s life appears to be strange and complicated, and although Alix finds her unsettling, she can’t quite resist the temptation to keep making the podcast. Slowly she starts to realize that Josie has been hiding some very dark secrets, and before she knows it, Josie has inveigled her way into Alix’s life—and into her home. This is a character-driven novel at it’s best. Odd, eccentric, maybe even a little strange, the characters in this book kept me in the dark until the end. I had a hard time deciphering who was legit and who was shady.One midsummer night during a neighborhood party, Pip, who is on the brink of teenagehood, finds her blood-soaked thirteen-year-old sister lying unconscious in a luxuriant rose garden. I do LOVE Jewell’s writing though and I think she’s crazy talented. I just didn’t connect with this book as much as her others.