Rating: 4.5 / 5
As a nod to Mother’s Day, the buddy read I help host decided to pick a couple of mother-ish books for May. After THE PERFECT MOTHER by Aimee Molloy for the first half of the month, we decided on PERFECT LITTLE CHILDREN by Sophie Hannah for the second half of the month!
PERFECT LITTLE CHILDREN finds Beth deciding on a whim to drive past the home of her former best friend Flora. It has been twelve years since they last saw each other and it isn’t initially clear why, but clearly Flora remains on her mind. While there, Flora comes home with her children Thomas and Emily, but to Beth’s shock Thomas and Emily look exactly the same as when she last saw them, as if they haven’t aged a day.
Though she drives away without investigating further, Beth can’t get this out of her head and she begins an obsessive hunt for answers, even dragging her own family into the investigation. As the story progresses, the weird happenings keep coming and the reader and characters are all left to wonder what is going on!
Wow did this novel impress me! The author did a fantastic job of laying out a bizarre mystery, complete with lots of red herrings and false assumptions. The main character, her family and definitely the reader are led to question what is going on and whether this is all in the protagonist’s head. As the story progresses, the author includes Beth’s family as witnesses to some of the oddities so we’re left to believe that this isn’t a typical unreliable narrator situation.
I read a lot of thrillers, but this is one that managed to surprise me at many of the turns it took. It was a fantastic book for a buddy read as well because there were so many different theories to bounce around, several that I hadn’t considered. I really wondered how the ending would wrap everything up, but the author managed to pull it off in a satisfying way.
This was my first book by Sophie Hannah, but I will absolutely be adding more of her books to my TBR!
DG Reads 