Category: 3.5 star

3.5 star

Review: A Stranger in the House by Shari Lapena

Fives @ Down The Rabbit Hole

In this neighborhood, danger lies close to home. A domestic thriller packed full of secrets, and a twisty story that never stops—from the bestselling author of The Couple Next Door

He looks at her, concerned. “How do you feel?” She wants to say, Terrified. Instead, she says, with a faint smile, “Glad to be home.”

Karen and Tom Krupp are happy—they’ve got a lovely home in upstate New York, they’re practically newlyweds, and they have no kids to interrupt their comfortable life together. But one day, Tom returns home to find Karen has vanished—her car’s gone and it seems she left in a rush. She even left her purse—complete with phone and ID—behind.

There’s a knock on the door—the police are there to take Tom to the hospital where his wife has been admitted. She had a car accident, and lost control as she sped through the worst part of town.

The accident has left Karen with a concussion and a few scrapes. Still, she’s mostly okay—except that she can’t remember what she was doing or where she was when she crashed. The cops think her memory loss is highly convenient, and they suspect she was up to no good.

Karen returns home with Tom, determined to heal and move on with her life. Then she realizes something’s been moved. Something’s not quite right. Someone’s been in her house. And the police won’t stop asking questions.

Because in this house, everyone’s a stranger. Everyone has something they’d rather keep hidden. Something they might even kill to keep quiet.

This is probably the second-last Shari Lapena thriller that I have to catch up on! She, of course, unsurprisingly by now, always has a great talent for fast-paced thrillers—I literally read this in a day. I believe I have actually read it once before, but despite that I still enjoyed re-reading it, although I kind of knew how it would end.

A Stranger in the House revolves mainly around a couple who lives in a nice neighbourhood and are newly married. But one day the wife drives like a bat out of hell in a dark part of town and gets into a serious accident. Why can’t she remember anything? Her paranoia also gets the best of her as she realizes someone has probably been in her house. This is a story of paranoia and the tale of a perfectly normal-looking couple falling apart at the seams. Will she recover her memories in time to see the truth?

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3.5 star

Review: An Unwanted Guest by Shari Lapena

Fives @ Down The Rabbit Hole

A weekend retreat at a cozy mountain lodge is supposed to be the perfect getaway . . . but when the storm hits, no one is getting away

It’s winter in the Catskills and Mitchell’s Inn, nestled deep in the woods, is the perfect setting for a relaxing–maybe even romantic–weekend away. It boasts spacious old rooms with huge woodburning fireplaces, a well-stocked wine cellar, and opportunities for cross-country skiing, snowshoeing, or just curling up with a good murder mystery.

So when the weather takes a turn for the worse, and a blizzard cuts off the electricity–and all contact with the outside world–the guests settle in and try to make the best of it.

Soon, though, one of the guests turns up dead–it looks like an accident. But when a second guest dies, they start to panic.

Within the snowed-in paradise, something–or someone–is picking off the guests one by one. And there’s nothing they can do but hunker down and hope they can survive the storm–and one another.

I’ve been trying to catch up on Shari Lapena’s thriller/mysteries, so here I am with a review of another one! I don’t always have the biggest expectations for her books, as the ending is often not exactly what I want (like it was again here). However, as a queen of suspense in the page to page reading, it once again delivered.

An Unwanted Guest takes place in a quaint hotel up in the snowy mountains when 12 guests get snowed in by a huge snowstorm. In typical closed-room scenarios, one by one people start dying off for seemingly inexplicable reasons. We get the POVs of all the guests and the two attending staff, and so begins our journey of suspense. The journey is incredibly fast-paced and suspenseful, even if the ending was much less so.

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3.5 star

Review: The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan

Fives @ Down The Rabbit Hole

Four mothers, four daughters, four families, whose histories shift with the four winds depending on who’s telling the stories. In 1949, four Chinese women, recent immigrants to San Francisco, meet weekly to play mahjong and tell stories of what they left behind in China. United in loss and new hope for their daughters’ futures, they call themselves the Joy Luck Club. Their daughters, who have never heard these stories, think their mothers’ advice is irrelevant to their modern American lives – until their own inner crises reveal how much they’ve unknowingly inherited of their mothers’ pasts.

With wit and sensitivity, Amy Tan examines the sometimes painful, often tender, and always deep connection between mothers and daughters. As each woman reveals her secrets, trying to unravel the truth about her life, the strings become more tangled, more entwined. Mothers boast or despair over daughters, and daughters roll their eyes even as they feel the inextricable tightening of their matriarchal ties. Tan is an astute storyteller, enticing readers to immerse themselves into these lives of complexity and mystery.

Now I know this is one of the classics. In fact, I was offered the chance to read this in Grade 11, but I chose The Great Gatsby instead. This is one of the great novels by an Asian author back when it was rare to have that. I have always wanted to finish the rest of the “choices” that I would have had back in high school, and this is one of them!

The Joy Luck Club follows four families that immigrated from China over to America, all under different circumstances. These are all mothers with daughters, and the mothers meet together to play mahjong and chat and share their stories. This is really a tale of generational trauma, the sacrifices made by all the mothers for the chance of a better life in America. In contrast, their (American) daughters leading their American lives experience many of the same problems in a different context.

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