The Other Child by Lucy Atkins

The Other Child by Lucy Atkins
Buy The Other Child by Lucy Atkins at Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com
Category: Thrillers
Reviewer: Zoe Page
Summary: An epic thriller, this leaves you desperate to uncover the secrets of the past before they destroy the present
Buy? Yes	Borrow? Yes
Pages: 400	Date: June 2015
Publisher: Quercus
External links: Author's website
ISBN: 978-1782069874
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Tess is giving up a lot to leave England for Massachusetts but she’s happy to do it too, happy that her son Joe will have new and exciting adventures, happy she will be living with Greg, the father of her unborn child. But pretty soon, unsettling things start happening. The neighbours are behaving strangely. Things in the house are mysteriously getting moved out of place. Nothing is as it seems and her dream is quickly becoming a nightmare.

When the anonymous notes start, Tess really starts to get concerned. Who is after her and why is Greg being so flippant about it all? The deeper she digs, the more she wishes she hadn’t started delving into the past.

This is a brilliant book that is just so approachable. I was hooked from the first page and couldn’t wait to find out what happened. The writing is so fluid and Tess such a sympathetic heroine, though the same certainly can’t be said for some of the other adults. It wasn’t hard to imagine how hard it was for her to move to suburban America and encounter, well, that. Two countries separated by a small bit of water but a massive gulf of culture and language.

All the characters were well developed and I instantly got a feel for the new community Tess found herself in, and the people from both her past and Greg’s whose stories also emerged. This could have been a love story, two newlyweds celebrating the imminent arrival of their first child together, but instead there is not a lot of love but quite a lot of war going on, and the book very much lives up to the title, and the cover design, in being a slightly eerie mystery just waiting to be uncovered.

There is very little I would change about this book. I liked that it was very human but not too giddy and girly. Tess is neither of those things, so it’s fitting that her tale has a harder edge to it, softened only by her growing bump and her concern for Joe.

I’d like to thank the publishers for sending us this to review. I thoroughly enjoyed it and found the story exciting, engaging and fresh. Definitely recommended and, thinking ahead to summer holidays, it would be a brilliant plane book as you would want to sit and read it straight through without stopping.

The Silent Sister by Diane Chamberlain is another mystery I just loved getting to the bottom of.

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You can read more book reviews or buy The Other Child by Lucy Atkins at Amazon.co.uk Amazon currently charges £2.99 for standard delivery for orders under £20, over which delivery is free.
You can read more book reviews or buy The Other Child by Lucy Atkins at Amazon.com.

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