Books & Bubbly

Synopsis

On the outside, it’s easy to think Suzette is living the dream. With a husband hot enough to cook bacon off of, a dream home designed by the two of them, and living as a stay-at-home-mom to a spitting-image daughter, how could she not be? What lies beneath the surface is a family living two lives - one where 7-year-old Hanna is a sweet darling to her doting father, all while she is an unholy terror to her mother. Suzette sees the ugly, twisted side of her little girl who chooses to be mute, torturing her family further with her refusal to communicate.

With a calculated wit and cunning intelligence that most adults don’t posses, Hanna does some unthinkable acts in trying to get rid of her mom, hoping to have Daddy all to herself. Through getting kicked out of any school she’s put in to, to punishing Mommy for the many doctor’s appointments relating to her silence, winding up to the sweetest pouty faces switching on and off when Daddy’s home, Hanna is a conniving child intent on one thing: getting rid of Mommy, one way or another.

Suzette is under constant torment by her daughter and just doesn’t understand why she is the object of such scorn and hatred. Hanna gets too much pleasure out of playing her terrifying games with Mommy to stop, and each time she ups the stakes until only one of them can remain: Hanna or Suzette.

Review

I LOVED this book. Everything about it. I can’t think of an element of it that I would have wanted different. The story itself is written from two points of view - Suzette’s and Hanna’s. Suzette makes for quite the sympathetic character, with a dark family past of her own and an auto-immune disease that keeps her on the edge. She does what she can to make sure that Hanna is taken care of, putting up with Hanna’s refusal to speak, her throwing objects and spitting food, slamming doors, and acting like a vicious dog in public.

Hanna on the other hand is loving the fear she sparks in her mother. Nothing makes her happier than seeing her mother caught off-guard, locking herself in her room, waiting for her husband Alex to come home and save the day. The dynamic between the two relationships - Hanna and her mother and Hanna with her father - is astoundingly well done. The complexity of all the little pieces, the story within the story, and the way the ending twists and merges takes it to a whole new level.

This book was written so well I found myself dreaming of it, wondering what Hanna was going to do next. I couldn’t put it down. I carried it with me everywhere I went, to each room in my house and every trip I took in case I had a down moment to read. It was enticing, cynical, engrossing, cringe-worthy at points, and overall one of my favorite reads of the year.

This is Zoje Stage’s debut novel, and if this is her debut, I cannot wait to see what else she has in store for us!

final girls by riley sager

B&B RATING: 3 / 5

MOOD: If you’re looking for a book to make you constantly second guess yourself, this one is for you.

Synopsis

What was supposed to be a fun weekend with her friends in the woods turned into an unprecedented nightmare. Celebrating the birthday of her best friend and college roommate Janelle, Quinn and a group of friends plan to spend the weekend in Pine Cottage, a cabin in the middle of nowhere. Cell phones locked away in the car, an abundance of booze, creepy woods, and a random stranger showing up creates the perfect mix of heady teenage fun, sexual tension, and a creepy unease.

After a night filled with partying, the entire group of friends is slaughtered by a random stranger - with Quinn being the only one to make it out and without a memory of anything that happened - both her blessing and curse of that night. Coop, the police offer that finds her hysterical and covered in blood, becomes her saving grace as she swims through the media, now part of an exclusive club of Final Girls: a total of three women, Quinn now included, who survived brutal massacres.

Now, another Final Girl commits suicide, and the other, Sam, comes out of the woodwork to seemingly mess with Quinn’s mind. Pushing Quinn to the point of uncontrollable rage, making her double guess what happened that night in Pine Cottage, and flipping her world upside down, Quinn takes a deeper look into the two Final Girls’ past to piece together why Sam is here. What Quinn finds is unprecedented, sending her in a whirlwind unlike any other.

Review

Filled with twists and turns, you’ll need to hold onto your seat for this one. While not hard to follow, there were times I had to go back in the book to resolve the timelines in my head. The characters were well developed, and the arc on Sam was astounding to me. I found myself much more interested in her story than in Quinn’s, often reading into her past, trying to understand what lead her to reach out to Quinn. Some pieces just don’t seem to make sense.

I’m starting to identify what a classic Riley Sager is. He has three books out (in order): FINAL GIRLS, THE LAST TIME I LIED, and LOCK EVERY DOOR. I’ve read LOCK EVERY DOOR and just got LAST TIME I LIED from the library yesterday, getting ready to continue my Spooky Season reading. When reading LOCK EVERY DOOR a few months ago, I was absolutely obsessed with it, needing to know what happened, like I needed it to breathe. I’ll do a full review on that one soon (I’m going through a backlog of some things I ready this year). While he knocked it out of the park for that one, I didn’t feel quite that way about FINAL GIRLS, but I finished it in four days, so it definitely wasn’t a bad read.

I love the way Sager writes - from the first-person point of view, sucking you into what the protagonist is thinking. It helps to trap the reader in the many twists and turns the book takes, and man, there were many. The beginning was captivating. I kept questioning what I knew, often switching my opinion of who the Pine Cottage killer was several times throughout the read. I wasn’t expecting the ending,

Told as a tale of current, mixed with memories revealing themselves about the past, this will keep you guessing, second guessing, triple guessing, and then still wrong at the end.