C. J. Skuse

2.5 stars

I received this book for free, this does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review

I wanted to murder the world.

When Rhiannon was six years old, her childminder and all five of the other kids were murdered by the estranged husband, who committed suicide after. Rhiannon was hit in the head by the husband with a hammer, but survived, laying underneath the decapitated childminder for hours before they were discovered. The hit to her ventromedial prefrontal cortex was severe and caused her to have to relearn everything, talking, walking. It also gave her a little bit of celebrity, with going on tv to do interviews all over and money from people that felt bad. Also, it's caused Rhiannon to have murderous rage, that she acts on.

Half the time, I admit, I crave normality, domesticity: a family, other heartbeats around, a comfy sofa of an evening and little pots of floral happiness growing silently on the balcony. The other half of the time, I want nothing more than to kill. To watch.

Told from Rhiannon's point-of-view from what are supposed to be her inner musings laid out like diary entries, Sweetpea was a long read into a Dexter like character. Having read How to Kill Men and Get Away with It by Katy Brent recently before this, I think some of my enjoyment was dampened a little because of how similar the characters and story were. Rhiannon, with her past, had more of a rounded out explanation than the Brent lead but at four hundred and seventy-two pages, this simply went on too long. The middle definitely sagged as Rhiannon's opinions about PICSOs (People I Can't Shake Off, friends she needs to appear “normal”) and every inconvenience or grievance she had in life was repeated, easily two hundred pages of this could have been cut out.

It was all so forced, like when I had to give my mum a cuddle as a kid or when I was expected to cry but it just felt like rain trickling down a window. Someone else's window.

Each chapter started with a kill list and the beginning will have you locked in as you get to know Rhiannon and question if she is just completely honest in her diary about her feelings or if she acts on them, that question does get answered fairly quickly and strongly when it becomes apparent that she has kidnapped an old school bully. The story then had some good reveals, how she witnessed her father joining in vigilante justice and beating up a pedophile and how this probably leads to her creating a set of killing rules, men who hurt women/kids and no one innocent. As the story goes on, it's revealed when and why Rhiannon has killed and readers might even start to side with her but the latter second half shows some cracks in her rules. How her not getting a promotion at work she thought she deserved, finding out her boyfriend of four years is cheating on her with a coworker, Rhiannon sleeping with someone at work to help her own cause, and all around self-serving actions that she does to “fit-in” and not cause suspicion her way.

If only they all knew what this quiet little sweetpea could do.

Even though this was nearly five hundred pages, it ends with a cliffhanger and I found it a bit maddening. It almost felt forced to create the series but I will also admit it did follow the unraveling of Rhiannon's sanity, it just was a very slow journey to it. Something Rhiannon set-up in the beginning (there are clues to what she is doing) comes back to bite her and the happy ending she seemed on track for, gets washed away and a possible new reporter that took Rhiannon's promotion could be on to her. If you like reading crass, honest with how she hates the world and people in it, splatter murdering, getting you to think about nature versus nurture, and necrophilia, the Sweetpea series would be for you.… (meer)

'Sweetpea' caught me by surprise, partly because the publisher's summary left me with the impression that I was going to read something light. clever and playfully dark and partly because I don't think I've ever read anything quite like it before.

This is a book that's brave enough to be truly dark without being even slightly exploitative. The story, told in the first person, feels brutally, invasively honest. It's an unedited, unashamed, raw feed from a woman who is unhappy, lonely angry and who needs to sate her desire to kill on a regular basis.

The main character, Rhiannon, is not a Hannibal Lector, taking decadent delight in his own cleverness at killing or a Dexter Morgan, following a moral code to constrain his 'dark passenger'. She's broken. She knows she's broken. She knows it's not her fault and she lives with it. Which means she does her best to fake being normal and to tamp down her anger and she only kills a tiny fraction of the people that she puts on her daily kill list.

I started 'Sweetpea' expecting a black comedy and there were things in it that made me laugh. Until I started to understand that what I thought was deadpan delivery was the unvarnished truth.

In the beginning, I found myself empathising with Rhiannon's situation and some of her reactions. She's an introvert who knows that her low need for social inclusion will mark her as odd so she fills the space where friends should be with PICSOs (People I Can't Scrape Off) a group of women whose self-obsession, vulgarity, habitual hedonism and absence of any thought beyond booze, boys and babies is a social rash Rhiannon constantly wants to scratch. . She's in a job which she'd like to excel at but where her contribution is undervalued and where she sees her colleagues as a collection of faults and irritations. Her relationship with her partner is part habit, part inertia and part camouflage.

I'm an introvert myself and I initially saw Rhiannon as an introvert suffering from having to live in an extrovert's world and pretend to like it. I enjoyed some of her caustic descriptions of her frustrations and what she'd like to do to the people who cause them. Except I don't feel the need for protective camouflage and I began to wonder why Rhiannon was so keen not to draw attention to the things that made her different, that made her her.

By the time I finally understood the reality of what Rhiannon does and how it makes her feel, I felt somehow complicit with her choices. I couldn't muster any moral outrage. Nor could I really cheer in support of her actions. I knew her better than I would ever have wanted to and I couldn't hate her. I knew she was damaged. I knew how the damage had happened and when. I knew that she could never be normal and that she was at least trying to show some restraint.

As the violence escalated and the body count mounted, the author added a new element: hope that everything might work out, that Rhiannon could be, if not normal, then at least less driven by rage.

But, by then, too many things were in motion that couldn't be stopped. There was too much blood under the bridge and I couldn't see a way out.

The plot was clever and intense, just like Rhiannon. I found the ending, which was open-ended without being a cliffhanger, strangely satisfying because it allowed me to sustain my ambivalence about Rhiannon.

'Sweetpea' was an extraordinary reading experience made even more intense by Georgia Maguire's excellent narration. Click on the SoundCloud link below to hear a sample.… (meer)