Sarah Stovell

Even as I was reading this, I knew I would find it difficult to review. The main reason was the amount of homophobia. As a queer woman I acknowledge it's an intricate part of the storyline but is so far outside of what I experience in my day-to-day life (something I know is a privilege) that I looked up when the book was published to find it was released in January 2022. I'd like to believe this kind of prejudice is deep in our past, but you only have to look at the destruction of LGBT books in a Cork Library in the last week to know it is unfortunately alive and well.

Other Parents takes place in the small rural town of West Burntridge focusing on the local primary school and its PTA. It has a revolving door set of characters and POVs. The most significant of these are Rachel Saunders, a well to do doctor, author and a take-no-bullshit character who has just left her husband and moved her new girlfriend into the family home; to Laura Spence, a single mum of Max who is barely able to make ends meet, a key member of the PTA who along with the head of the PTA first challenges LGBT education in the school and then starts a campaign against it.

This book doesn't hold back in throwing in the kitchen sink of issues from local gossip and rumour spreading to social politics, divorce, single parenting, child exploitation and abuse, consent, sexual assault, and prostitution. but with so many issues none of them are really dealt with in the depth the subject requires. I picked this up as it was part of @another.chapter.podcast most recent read-along (I was late to the party) and listened on audio. I felt like the PTA anti LGBT protest and most of the community’s lack of support was explicit in the early chapters and it was dragged out for the rest of the story to give a reason for additional conflict between the involved parties leading to an ending that was going to be explosive.

I likely would not have finished this if it wasn’t on audiobook. The narrator was brilliant but overall it’s just not a book for me.… (meer)

Home – A Gripping Thriller

Sarah Stovell has written a gripping thriller, with an excellent twist that will keep you guessing all the way through to the end. This really is a stonking thriller, that takes you to the Lake District and to girls in care. Not the usual sort of thriller you would expect, but Sarah Stovell likes using surprising subjects in her excellent thrillers.

When a young girl is found dead, with her unborn child, in a churchyard on Christmas Day, and her friend is found crying over her body, the police think the obvious, she is guilty. We get to follow this story through the eyes of the dead as well as those still alive, as we uncover the lives of all the players in this thriller.

We learn how the desperate for love can be the victims of abuse, how teenagers with no family love can find love in the strangest of places. We see the dark sides of both these children who themselves are victims. We see how their nurture has affected their lives and their future.

On a deeper level, it does make us reflect on how we treat children, who through no fault of their own, are outside the societal norm of ‘loving family’. How they are treated by adults, good and bad, and how they have to try and stand on their own feet from a young age. We can never know that pressure.

This really is an excellent thriller, that will keep you gripped from beginning to end.… (meer)