I couldn’t put this down but at the same time it felt like nothing really happened apart from Sarah unravelling. The PTA politics and WhatsApp groups are uncannily accurate, and it’s a true to life story that you can imagine happening, but it’s a bit meandering at times.

Thanks to Net Galley and Harper Collins UK for an ARC of this book in exchange for a review.
The world of mums at the school gate, these mums in my opinion behave like children rAther than adults. I did not like any of these yummy mummies, I found them all irritating, all of the woman talked about one another and leaked each other’s secrets.
The story is about friendships, the impact of social media and the impact of one small untruth becoming so much more.
Unfortunately I found this book rather a chore to read.

I enjoyed this book about this group of middle class mummies and the tittle tattle that rules their lives, especially after an accident which threatens to ruin a friendship. There are lots of hints about secrets in the three main families, which are eventually revealed in full and explain the actions of those characters. A good read.

I'm on the fence about this book, it was an easy enough read, good for a cosy night in, in front of the fire, however I think the author wasn't 100% set in what she wanted all the twists to be and the end sort of fell apart in my opinion, It felt rushed.
On the whole I did enjoy the book, but it felt like it was lacking something from the halfway point.

This completely epitomises everything that is wrong with competitive motherhood, with fake support and with small minded judgement of simple actions that have far reaching consequences.
For me this was an emotive read as I have seen examples of this type of judgement in real life and the details descrbed in the book were as cringeworthy as experiencing it first hand.
A great plot with great emotional depth covering a very tricky set of subjects.

What a book. A fabulous plot that flows so effortlessly pl characters are strong, deep and bold.
Well written, story is strong. A must read.
Thank you to both NetGalley and Harper Collins for gifting me the book in exchange for my review

A really compelling thriller, in the vein of Lianne Moriarty. A middle class community of an affable part of North London is rocked when one of their sons is injured in an accident. Lies, concealments and manipulation all play a part in a story packed full of tension. An anxiety-inducing un-put-down-able read!

I found it hard to get into this story, I didn’t find the characters very pleasant, so I didn’t care much about their problems.
I ploughed through it, but these people’s over privileged lives have nothing in common with mine.
Sorry - not for me!

This novel makes me glad I am a mother of grown up children, it made me realise the pressure young mums put on themselves to be perfect
From joining the right health club to your child attending the best school
And all whilst under the social media spotlight I mean how many what's app groups do you need ??
Well sometimes too many and is you send a message out to the wrong person by mistake well be prepared for the fallout, not nice. Not pretty and resulting in the end so friendships
Is it worthwhile? You decide

An excellent book that was very realistic in places. It took me back to my playground mum days of watching the bitching and gossip some parents partake in. At times I found Sarah very annoying, she completely let her guilt take over all aspects of her life.

I found the ending quite sad really but completely understandable. Thanks to NetGalley and the publishers for the ARC in return for an honest and unbiased opinion.

I always admire authors who are able to write books that are easy to read, as this one is, because I imagine they're very difficult to write.
While there is nothing new in this story I found the characters believable, although I'm still not sure why Liz's is written in the first person and Sarah in the third.
Thank you to netgalley and Harper Collins for an copy of this book.

This was a story full of toxic friendships, misunderstandings and not saying what is on your mind....as well as a Whatsapp message sent to the wrong chat!

Liza and Sarah have been friends for 5 years and met at an NCT class, they became close and their children go to the same school. They socialise as families and have even joined the new health club that just opened, loving the play area that the kids can lay in whilst they have a much needed coffee and chat. All perfect until Liza's son has soon Jack has an accident...Sarah said shed keep an eye on him, but got distracted by the arrival of Ella,another NCT mum who mysteriously cut herself from their friendship years ago, so caught up by Ella's reappearance that she doesn't see Jack fall and then doesn't tell Liza the truth....then the fallout begins.

I did enjoy this book, the toxic friendships did make me feel glad that I could close the book and walk away from it.

Thanks to Netgalley for the opportunity to review this book, this is my honest opinion.

Not my mind of novel but I persevered. Yummy mummies and how they react to a tragic accident,lots of smug boyfriends and some real heartbreak.

With thanks to Netgalley, Pigeonhole and the publishers for the arc, which I did enjoy reading.
I read this book via Pigeonhole, which delivers the book in 10 sections over 10 days. The book was quite an interesting story but it did drag on for a time and the reader found that none of the characters were particularly likeable. The last two staves pulled the whole storyline together and made some sense of the book.
Recommended.

I found this slow going but an interesting view into mental health issues; particularly post-natal, PTSD and grief.

I rather liked this. In the genre of Big Little Lies and The Slap, where an incident involving a child has a knock on effect which jeopardises a whole community, it is about a group of competitive young mothers in West London. They all have children in the local school and belong to a members-only club where they drink coffee, play tennis and do yoga, leaving kids in the soft play area. One of the children falls and sustains a serious injury. Who is to blame? Watching Sarah self-destruct as she gets entangled in her own lies is morbidly fascinating. She misinterprets everything and makes terrible decisions. Also keeping secrets are Ella and Liza. Most of the drama is shared on social media and lies, gossip and fake news spread like wildfire. A tale of our times, nicely rounded up at the end.

I was quite surprised to find that I actually didn't really like this book. I thought it was going to be great, a story of claustrophobic tensions and bitchy school-gate politics. But actually, it was just entirely claustrophobic, filled with anxiety, deliberately obscure, and needlessly melodramatic.
Generally I quite like these kinds of psychological insights into women's lives, and particularly the relentless comparison which happens with school mums (and yet not dads?) and seems to overtake every aspect of one's life. So I thought I would love The Fallout. But actually I really... didn't. In fact, I quite disliked it.
There were some aspects of this which were great. Bitchy groupchats on Whatsapp, gossipping mothers, stories getting overblown out of all proportion and the absolute mortification of sending a message to the person it's about, instead of the person you meant to send it to. And yes, I quite enjoyed all of that. But many aspects of the book totally overshadowed what I liked, leaving me quite disappointed about everything.
Firstly, I didn't like the narrative style. The two main characters, Liza and Sarah, were written in first and third person, positioning Liza, the fpv, as the main character, despite the book actually being about Sarah, who was written in third person. And while the interspersed whatsapp chats were interesting, it didn't make sense that a chat with only two people in it had a specific name - would it not just be your message thread with that person? Why would it need a name? Unless people make chats to talk about specific things, and I'm just way behind the times with my single conversation with each person... Anyways. I also didn't like the journalistic interviews which broke the spaces between chapters. Largely because they didn't go anywhere, and didn't seem to serve any purpose. Can't see what the logic behind them was.
So the structure of the book got to me. And so did the reaction of Sarah to the accident - her stress over it all was completely incomprehensible to me. I don't understand, even having finished the book, why she was so guilty about it all. Perhaps that's because I'm not a mother, though, so I let that one slide.

My largest annoyance, though, and the one which made me really dislike the book, was how needlessly obscure the characters were. Even when we were inside the character's head, and they were thinking about something, the actual content of the thing was obscured from the reader. A good example of this is a whatsapp message which was accidentally sent to the person it was about. We see the message being sent, from Sarah's perspective. But we don't find out what the message says. Then she thinks about how awful it is that she sent this, and tries to delete it, but fails to do so before the unintended recipient reads it. Following this, she stresses about it for like, three days, but never mentions the content of the message. It's then sent to no fewer than four different whatsapp groups, before being sent back to Sarah, the original sender. And despite us seeing the reactions to the message from a whole bunch of people, we don't see what the message actually said until two or three chapters later. And there's just no need for this kind of pointless obfuscation. The same sort of vagueness or obscuring things that the characters know from the readers permeates the whole book, from the message Sarah sees that makes her forget about checking on Jack to the 'thing' that happened after Jack was born. There's just NO NEED for this kind of pointless obscurity. Not only that, but it's actually intensely frustrating and clunky to read characters thinking about 'that thing'. I could kind of understand it in the case (and ONLY the case) of what happened after Jack was born, because as a traumatic experience, I can understand not wanting to think about the specifics. But it happens over and over again. Liza's uber destination, Ella's text message, the appointment Sarah has... The frustration of knowing that the author is writing in a deliberately clunky way to save 'shocks' for the reader for later is distracting enough that it ruined the whole book for me, and I doubt I'll read anything else by Thornton, for fear the same thing occurs elsewhere.

This is an interesting dilemma faced by Sarah when she checks on her friend’s son and notices he is climbing a pole which she realises could be unsafe yet fails to stop him when she sees someone she is keen to speak to and gets distracted. When her friend asked if she checked him she fails to mention what he was doing and is terrified of admitting what happened when he falls and seriously injured himself.

I enjoyed this overall however I found Sarah's character very difficult to understand, she had suffered a trauma a year ago which she had repressed rather than deal with however I still found her extreme and she just totally unravelled. Liza was a nicer character however it was difficult to understand her relationship with her husband until the end. As a dilemma this worked really well, I just found the characters difficult although the plot was solid..

Definitely for fans of Big Little Lies. The novel deals with the intense way motherhood can change your perspective and cause you to lose your way at times, second guessing everything. I found the novel quite stressful to read. From almost the beginning of the story it has an impending sense of doom. I normally love a flawed character but by gosh these ladies were annoying. I was fed up of hearing their self absorbed angst. I was left feeling very little sympathy for any of them which is a shame as I have had PND and know how much this impacts your first impressions of motherhood.

Some parts of this story were really good. The conversations linking the story together really worked. Some of the conversations and behaviour seemed more like teenage girls than grown women. I agree with the ending. I think that was the only way it could be concluded.

Thank you to Netgalley for my copy.