Thursday 5 June 2014

***REVIEW*** Just What Kind of Mother Are You by Paula Daly

What if your best friend's child disappears? And it was all your fault.

This is exactly what happens to Lisa Kallisto, overwhelmed working mother of three, one freezing December in the English Lake District. She takes her eye off the ball for just a moment and her whole world descends into the stuff of nightmares. Because, not only is thirteen-year-old Lucinda missing, and not only is it all Lisa's fault, but she's the second teenage girl to disappear within this small tightknit community over two weeks. The first girl turned up stripped bare, dumped on a busy high street, after suffering from a terrifying ordeal.

Wracked with guilt over her mistake and after being publicly blamed by Lucinda's family, Lisa sets out to right the wrong. But as she begins peeling away the layers surrounding Lucinda's disappearance, Lisa learns that the small, posh, quiet town she lives in isn't what she thought it was, and her friends may not be who they appear, either.


I remember seeing a Goodreads friend add this to their list, and thought it looked quite interesting. I grabbed it on Kindle for £2 or so, and picked it up on Tuesday night. I think I read around 20% before falling asleep, then picked it up on Wednesday, and I must say I finished the rest of the book in one sitting!!! I could not put it down for even a minute.

The storyline grabbed me from the get go, I could never imagine losing a child, but this book was all about losing somebody else's child. Now can you imagine how you'd feel? You're looking after a friends child, but suddenly without you noticing, she's missing?  Now that is a good story to read.

I really liked Lisa, a mother of 3, works in an animal shelter, has a busy life. The guilt she felt when she realised Lucinda was supposed to be sleeping over and ended up missing, I thought the emotion jumped from the pages. The other characters were great too, I particularly liked Crazy Jackie and Joanne (the Detective), although I thought there was a lot of concentration on Joanne's breast problem, which in my opinion didn't need to be there, nothing to do with the story at all.

I liked the author note at the end. Paula Daly came up with the story for this book, after seeing a real story on Oprah about a lady who had a lot going on and forgot about her child she left in the car, sadly the child died. This lady received death threats, pretty nasty things were said. We all have a million things going on, and sometimes it is easy for things to slip your mind.

1 comment:

  1. Sounds like a scarily good story. It must be horrible to have that happen to someone. Glad you enjoyed it.

    ReplyDelete

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