“Twenty-five years after losing her friend Tessa in a tragic accident, Emma’s life is happy and settled. She rarely thinks about the day that Tessa fell to her death, or the secret that she made Emma swear to keep just hours before. But when her marriage implodes, Emma and her daughter find themselves unexpectedly moving into the headmaster’s former cottage on the grounds of her old school – Denham House. And it’s here she finds the photograph: an explicit image of Tessa, looking directly at the camera. Between catching up with old friends Marlee and Clementine, who are home for a reunion, and the demands of single parenthood, Emma has plenty to distract her… but she can’t shake the image of the photograph. Or the thought that it’s proof of something she had long suspected: Dr Brownley, now headmaster, was involved with Tessa. Was it a mistake to keep quiet about what she knew? Marlee and Clementine have their own complex feelings about returning to their hometown. And when Emma starts to question what really happened to Tessa, each woman must deal with the consequences of decisions they made all those years ago. Because the more Emma digs into the past, the more she discovers that everyone remembers it differently, and that the innocent schoolgirls she thought she knew are hiding some very big secrets.”
I was really looking forward to reading Good Little Liars based on the summary provided, but I ended up a bit disappointed. I normally try to write my own summary of what I read as well, but I felt it was important to show the summary provided with the book so you would understand my disappointment! I had seen this book classified via Netgalley as Literary/Women’s Fiction, but the summary made it seem like more of a thriller or a murder mystery to me. I love both genres so normally I would have been happy either way. Unfortunately, I found this book hard to get in to. The pacing was very slow and I had a hard time relating to/liking most of the characters. I think what really would have made a difference for me would be focusing more on Emma and maybe one other character’s point of view instead of the three/four we did hear from. The “murder mystery” portion of this book ended up being fairly anti-climatic in the end. There was all this set up that finally started coming in to play and made it seem like I was going to read a huge bomb drop towards the end, but it ended up being more of a fizzle.
Thank you to Netgalley and Bookouture for the ARC of this book. This was a voluntary review.
Kaitlyn Reads 