This domestic thriller follows pregnant Helen as she makes a new friend - Rachel- at her birthing class. Rachel is brash, unpredictable, soon to be a single mother, and Helen finds herself drawn into a friendship with her. While Helen's husband is off at work, Helen and Rachel spend more and more time together, often unexpectedly running into each other while they are out and about. At first, Helen is glad for the company and someone to distract her from her worries about her pregnancy. However, as their relationship grows and Rachel's behavior becomes increasingly erratic, Helen starts to try and distance herself. Unfortunately, they are too deeply connected for Helen to simply ghost away and when Rachel threatens to expose a secret from the past, it becomes clear that some secrets won't stay buried for long.
TW/CW: pregnancy, past miscarriage, sexual assault, drug use, infidelity
This turned out to be a much more of a psychological thriller than I was expecting. I find that most domestic thrillers have some elements of psychological thriller to them and that is always my favorite part of domestic thrillers. So I was very pleased when this started out pretty standard domestic thriller but pretty quickly took a turn into the psychological and then went full speed down that road. We get into some unreliable narrator territory as well which I think really works well to heighten the tension in the story.
The characters were really well developed but I think a lot of them fall into the 'unlikable' category which I know some readers don't like. Helen has had multiple past miscarriages so she is a little high strung and worried about her current pregnancy that seems to be going well so far. She comes across as judgemental and there were times where she seemed so oblivious of the feelings of those around her (like her husband) that I wasn't sure how someone like her could have actually formed and kept these close friendships. I really loved the amount of history Faulkner was able to insert into these character relationships very easily and they all seemed to get along really well. Which just made it all the more satisfying once the secrets start coming out and those relationships get tested.
The different POVs did not really work for me well in this book despite that being one of my favorite narrative styles for thrillers. I found the POV switching to be, at least in the first half, pretty jarring and it felt really unnecessary. We're following Helen in her adventures around town for a good number of chapters and then suddenly we're in the POV of this other character who I don't think we'd even heard about before then. Of course, I expected the two POVs to become connected at some point (because this is a story, afterall). It felt like that other POV started off at the wrong point in that character's story arc. Looking back, I can see why Faulkner would choose to start there, but in the moment while I was reading, I really didn't see the point. I do like the POV switching in the last third of the book better because when we're getting a bunch of secrets revealed we can see just how those secrets are affecting the various characters. There were some great reveals done with these different POV chapters but it felt like the author had those moments decided on first and then she had to add in other POV chapters earlier so they wouldn't come in as a surprise that late in the narrative.
There was a pretty strong mystery element to this story that really kicks off after the midpoint twist and I did feel like some of the pieces for that mystery were a little too heavy handed. It felt like each character was given one big piece of information/clue revealed about them that really stood out to me. There wasn't really any other, smaller pieces of information given so then when the twists and reveals start happening in the last 75% of the story, it felt so obvious because I was thinking "of course A character did that, they were the only one that was mentioned doing X". It felt like the mystery hinged, mostly, on the reader not really noticing/thinking too much about these bits of information at the time but then they can look back after the reveal and see the clue was there the whole time. Some of the clues just seemed to be dropped into the narrative in such a heavy handed way that really made me pick up on them immediately and be on the lookout while I continued reading for anyway that information would be useful. Now, of course, this is a domestic/psychological thriller, not strictly a mystery so maybe I'm being too picky about how the mystery thread was handled. I think the reveals and plot points were really well done and there were some surprises for me despite everything I picked up on, but I really would have liked a little more finesse in these elements.
The ending was absolute perfection and honestly kicked up my rating a whole star. I thought the way everything came together was done really well and this is where all the multi-POV chapters really paid off. The tension and pacing was great and I felt like I couldn't turn the pages fast enough. We were neck deep in unreliable narrator mode so there was also this underlying aspect of maybe nothing is as it seems and there's going to be a twist completely out of left field. The book opens with a flash forward so we sort of know the general direction the story is headed, but we don't know the who or why of how, specifically, we get to that scene in the future. I thought the narrative device Faulkner uses to give the reader the big explanation of the 'why' behind the actions of certain characters was really well done and didn't feel info-dumpy as many reveals at the end of these thriller/mystery books can. I also loved the last line of the book and the implication that line provided was a really great moment.
Overall, this was a really great domestic/psychological thriller with fantastic characters, tension, and a great ending.
Thanks NetGalley and Gallery Books for the ARC
Expected publication date is January 25, 2022
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