When Amy Foster moved out of Chicago to one of the nearby suburbs, she was pleasantly surprised at how quickly she settled in - especially after finding her friend group of Liz, Jess, and Melissa. The four women find solidarity in eschewing certain suburbia cliches and during their monthly wine night. On one of these wine nights, the friends go into Liz's backyard to christen their soon to be clubhouse, the She Shed. Only instead of bestowing blessings, the group starts to feel like they may have unearthed something sinister. This feeling is heightened when Liz starts acting strange and other strange occurrences start happening. Now Amy, Jess, and Melissa must fight to save Liz and the neighborhood they've come to love.
I really enjoyed the whole neighborhood/cul-de-sac setting and how much it added to the story. This was a really fun read and I can see this being a good vacation read. It takes place over summer vacation so we get lots of interactions with the neighbors through block parties, the neighborhood pool, and the annual ice cream social. Being able to see the characters and their families in this setting really helped strengthen the stakes of the story because we see first hand what these characters would lose. We also get some lore and background of how this neighborhood came to be, which was an interesting tangent to go down. I've felt with some other books set in suburbia that the setting was more of an afterthought, but in this case I really think the neighborhood shines and I can't really see this story unfolding in any other setting.
I loved the characters and their friend group dynamic. I found all 3 of our main-ish characters to be really well developed and distinct from one another. The story is told from Amy's POV, but she does spend a lot of time with Jess and Melissa. Kilmer did a fantastic job of giving concrete character traits and emotional layers to each character. I also loved how the group dynamic really hinged on each of the characters being themselves and how they each brought something unique to the friend group. Of course, when it comes to this type of setting, I think most readers would expect certain character types to live in this neighborhood. And while we do see those stereotypes in the story, Kilmer gave enough details to our main friend group to ensure they stood out from the crowd. I do wish we had gotten a bit more of the four friends together before the main plot kicked off because Liz was the one friend who I didn't feel had a lot of detail to her character. But that might be on purpose because we do hear throughout the story that they didn't realize how much they missed Liz since she was always sort of in the background, even in their small group.
I went into this book unsure of where the line would be drawn - this could have easily gone full horror but it stayed more in the fun, vacation read territory. It reminded me a lot of The Southern Book Club's Guide to Slaying Vampires, because we're following Amy who is trying to convince her friends and husband that something potentially supernatural is going on but they don't take her seriously at first. We get some really great creepy moments that I absolutely loved - the robot vacuum scene will forever be a favorite - and I think there was some decent building of tension through these moments. However, I do think that the book missed the mark just a bit when it came to finding the right balance between the supernatural and the everyday. I get that Amy has other responsibilities and can't just sit around reading exorcism books all day but it felt like the scales were tipped toward making the mundane suburbia plot points feel more important. This balance might be tweaked a bit for the final copy (I read an ARC) or maybe other readers feel differently, but it just irked me a tiny bit.
I did feel like the pacing was a little uneven and I wished there was more escalation to the supernatural events that we get. My favorite part of these sort of 'is it supernatural or does a character have an over-active imagination' plots is having the reader question the reality of the story. I want to be reading along and sort of question the reality of the situation myself - or find myself agreeing with a point a character makes that I hadn't thought of before. This slow escalation and flip flopping is really fun for me and I think it builds to a really great, natural climax to the story. In this case, however, I felt like Kilmer tried to inject some of that dynamic but it didn't quite work for me. I found that there was such a drastic initial change to Liz that it was obvious something weird was going on. Now, the book description doesn't try to hide the fact that something supernatural is going on, so maybe it isn't fair for me to be looking for that type of slow build up in the first place. On the other hand, I didn't feel like the stakes were fully fleshed out past the small friend group. It felt very much like "if we don't do this, we'll lose Liz forever" but I was really expecting there to be more of a threat to their families or the neighborhood as a whole. Again, maybe this book was just too lighthearted to really double down on the stakes there and we do have a little bit of a "if we don't fix this, we'll have to move away and we'll never see each other again" moment, but I just wanted more.
Overall, this was a really fun read and I would recommend picking it up as a vacation read. I love the setting, characters, and where the book chose to draw the horror line. I did find the pacing and escalation pattern a little unsatisfying, but I might be asking for a little too much there.
Thanks to NetGalley and G.P. Putnam's Sons for the ARC
Publication date was August 30, 2022
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