by Christina McDonald
My Ratings
Plot – ★★★★☆
Character Development – ★★★☆☆
World Building – ★★★☆☆
Editing – ★★★★☆
Enjoyment – ★★★☆☆
Summary
If you can’t remember it, how do you prove you didn’t do it?
Eva Hansen wakes in the hospital after being struck by lightning and discovers her mother, Kat, has been murdered. Eva was found unconscious down the street. She can’t remember what happened but the police are highly suspicious of her.
Determined to clear her name, Eva heads from Seattle to London—Kat’s former home—for answers.
But as she unravels her mother’s carefully held secrets, Eva soon realizes that someone doesn’t want her to know the truth. And with violent memories beginning to emerge, Eva doesn’t know who to trust. Least of all herself.
The Review
Eva currently lives a relatively charmed life – a hotshot boyfriend, a beautiful apartment, and a dream job. But under the surface, things aren’t what they seem. Haunted by her own personal problems and secrets, it is easy for her to question if it is possible that she was the person who murdered her mother.
Waking up in the hospital to find that her mom is dead, she’s a suspect, and she has very little in the way of memories of the event. The last thing Eva remembers is a knife in her hand and her mom’s body on the floor. But she couldn’t have killed her, could she?
She sets out to her childhood home to look for clues to clear her name and recover the lost memories, but what she does find there takes her on a trip across the Atlantic and into the dark and sinister past of her mother, Kat.
In doing so, she realises that someone doesn’t want her finding the answers.
If you like twisty, tense, “Who did it?” type of novels, this is a great one to pick up. Christina McDonald tells the story from both Eva’s and Kat’s points of view. One set in present-day and the other set many years before- however, both are unreliable narrators. Eva more so because she has amnesia due to being struck by lightning (a little bit on the nose, don’t you think?). The last thing she remembers is a family dinner, and everything after is blank until she woke up covered in blood and her mother was dead.
The police’s main suspect was, of course, Eva. But she was adamant she had nothing to do with her mother’s murder, even if the ‘flashbacks’ she had in the course of the books told a story much more worrying.
I couldn’t trust anything. Not what I remembered, not what I thought I saw, Not myself
Kat’s story alone is a heart-breaking one. As you turn the pages, it crumbles a little bit more. Add in Eva’s own trauma’s, and you’ll understand why their current interactions are tense.
Personally, I figured out a chunk of the ‘twist’ within the first few chapters, but the way Christina’s writing flows makes this a compelling page-turner means I read it within a couple of hours and enjoyed every moment of it.
I am, however, giving it 3 stars because it was so quick to figure out if you pay enough attention to Eva’s interactions with the types of people she has in her life. I felt some things should have been held back a little longer and kept towards the latter half of the book.
We aren’t defined by our tragedies, by our history, by our mistakes, but by pieces of love and sadness and happiness, and the whole range of human emotions we feel.
Where to buy
It can be purchased digitally in the Kindle Store or in paperback.
Alternatively, you can get it at The Book Depository for purchase in your local currency.
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