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I managed to race through this novel at lightning speed, not because it’s particularly short or easy in subject matter (it is not for the faint hearted that’s for sure) but because it was SO gripping.  I honestly had difficulty tearing myself away from this book: Dear Child has a mindbendingly twisty yet taut plot and at times it had me reeling.

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Dear Child is an EXCEEDINGLY tense novel; Hausmann cleverly uses short sharp chapters to ramp up the tension to scintillating levels and switches between narrator just at the crucial point, so that where the reader thinks they might receive a tiny morsel of information, she flips to a new chapter and a different voice.  It had me positively buzzing with excitement.

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I got through three quarters of this novel without a single inkling as to just what had happened to Lena, and even towards the end of the book when I started to think that I might have worked it all out, Hausmann slapped me round the face with a wicked curveball which genuinely left me aghast. When I finished it, I had to go back to see if she’d dropped any hints at all throughout the book; so shocked was I by the outcome.

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This novel is a jumpy, nervous, hold-your-breath kind of creepy and has set the bar very high indeed for incoming novels in the psychological thriller genre.

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Heart-racingly thrilling; I tore through this book in just a couple of days; Dear Child is #griplit at it’s finest and I am very much looking forward to Hausmann’s next offering!

This kept me on the edge of my seat from the beginning to the end. It was brilliant.
A psychological thriller taking you down many paths. The main characters are Jasmin, Hannah, and Matthias.
I was hooked from the word go, there's a kidnapping, a mystery, loads of terror, even Stockholm syndrome. Although loosely similar to the book Room, this story was different in that it was told through the eyes of many characters and incorporated the feelings and going on of the relatives of the victim and how it impacted them too.
I highly recommend this. It has awell developed plot which will keep you guessing till the end.

What a great story. The twists and turns I didn't see coming. The pages just kept turning I couldn't stop reading. Characters relatable. Well written and easy to read.

Intriguing psychological mystery, kidnap/captive aftermath with differing perspectives.

3.5 stars, rounded up.

Immediate comparisons to Room are inevitable. But the obvious difference is that this story starts where Room began its final act/epilogue, where liberation occurs. And this isn't a straightforward child's naive/confused/sheltered perspective.

Lena takes on some narration for us, as the woman who was kept in a cabin deep in the woods, her children with the man keeping her there kept under lock and key, their lives controlled minute to minute. She executes an escape but her experience continues to plague her, and won't let go. Lena's father, waiting to hear about his missing daughter for a long time, is called to identify the woman found in the woods - angry at the police 'incompetence' at not finding her, he comes to see his little girl, now a mother. And Hannah, Lena's eldest child, astue beyond her years but emotionally toughened - her account of their life in the cabin puzzles and worries. As police struggle to construct a complete picture of who the man was, what happened, the versions don't add up or match. There is a puzzle with missing pieces.

I preferred the build up to the solution of the mystery, which didn't give the satisfaction I was expecting. Until that point though, the narratives were gripping. Including Hannah's perspective was particularly riveting, as someone grown up in that environment and conditioned to consider it normal. Lena's father I found biased and too angry to be sympathetic throughout. The victim herself played a more minor role than I would have expected, the other two voices seemed more vital to the pace of the book.

Translated from the German, it did draw me in, though I was expecting more from Hannah near the end and a less typical denouement. Still, some novel features for the genre.

With thanks to Netgalley for providing an advance reading copy.

A psychological masterpiece.

Words fail me. One of the best books I have ever read.

There are so many twists and crumbs of information thoroughout. It is impossible to guess what's coming, it is impossible to put down.

You will feel fear.

Rating 4.5/5

I needed a bit of a change of pace after my last read and a thriller seemed like the perfect choice, especially one that sounded as good in the blurb as this one did.

This was a book that I managed to completely lose myself in, the kind of thriller that is so absorbing that I read it in just a couple of sittings. There is something that always strangely attracts me to this type of story, I find it interesting the psychology of the motives behind the abductor and Dear Child hit all the right notes for me.

The story is told through three narrators and we get glimpses of Lena and Hannah’s time in the cabin and the aftermath of their escape. I had so many questions from the start and those only increased as the story unfolded, this definitely amped up the tension throughout the story. I’m not going to delve into the storyline too much because it’s one that you will want to discover for yourself but it did have me puzzling over its many pieces and every time I discovered something new it added to the suspense of the overall story and my need to discover who was behind Lena’s disappearance.

The characters were all very complex and interesting and I was questioning them at every turn. I admired that the aftermath of the escape was handled so well and you could feel the confusion, fear and mistrust of the outside world that the characters felt and again this added extra layers to the story but also to the suspense. The only character I wasn’t so keen on was Lena’s father Matthias, there was something that just didn’t sit right with me about him but actually, at the conclusion of the story I was impressed by his character arc.

There was a lot about this book that I wasn’t expecting and it made for a very intense reading experience, but thankfully every question that ran through my head was answered by the end and I was left in awe of Lena’s fighting spirit. I think this is a book that is sure to impress and there are a lot of people that will be just as captivated as I was with it, I’d be excited to see what this author comes up with next.

A riveting read that is intense and disconcerting. Lena went missing several years ago and then a young woman is discovered after a road accident and is erroneously believed to be Lena. The young woman is Jasmin who has been abducted and is found with two children Hannah and Jonathan who call her mother and she talks to herself as Lena. This is the key to a Harrowing story .
This book concentrated on the effects of abduction and being hidden away in isolation under the influence of a single individual. It can be harrowing

An uncomfortable and rather confusing read which I am in the minority not liking by the many five star reviews I’ve read on it.

In my role as English Teacher, I love being able to spend time reviewing books for our school library which I use to help the students make great picks when they visit us as well as running a library junior and senior book group where we meet every week and share the books we love and talk about what makes a great read. This is certainly a book that I'd be happy to display at the front as one of my monthly 'top picks' which often transform into 'most borrowed' between students and staff. It's a great read and ties in with my ethos of wishing to assemble a diverse, modern and thought-provoking range of books that will inspire and deepen a love of reading in our students of all ages. This book answers this brief in spade! It has s fresh and original voice and asks the readers to think whilst hooking them with a compelling storyline and strong characters It is certainly a book that I've thought about a lot after finishing it and I've also considered how we could use some of its paragraphs in supporting and inspiring creative writing in the school through the writers' circle that we run. This is a book that I shall certainly recommend we purchase and look forward to hearing how much the staff and students enjoy this memorable and thought-provoking read.

This room reminded me very much of the book “Room” which I enjoyed as well. This was a well written book and it kept me interested all the way through. I kept thinking whilst I was reading this of how I would escape from this man’s clutches and with two children In tow, how would I do it. I enjoyed this book a lot although I did get very frustrated for the woman when things didn’t go as she planned at times.
My thanks to Netgalley and the publishers for giving me the opportunity to read this book in return for an honest review.

This book was amazing! It's an absolute must read for all thriller fans, dark and intriguing throughout, it's pretty hard to put down

Strongly drawn, believable characters. This is an excellent book that makes you think about what you are reading while at the same time thoroughly enjoying the experience of reading an exceptionally well-written book.

It seems to be fashionable at the moment to have a story told from a variety of viewpoints. In other books, I have found this contrived and confusing but in this book each voice is clear and distinct.

As well as praising the author, I feel that the translator deserves acknowledgment for doing an excellent job and keeping the feel of the story true to the intriguing complex German original

I found this to be a slow read. The beginning had been good then the middle to the end dragged. I felt like it lost its story then the ending was a bit more dramatic but not as surprising as I thought. The characters were hard to understand & to know who was who. I didnt feel it was a good consistent story. Lena and her children are locked in a cabin in the woods. They have know idea who they actually really are & once lena escapes, the nightmare isnt over

Wow!  Dark, immersive, intriguing, complex, and totally gripping.  A smart new take on a story of a person held captive.

This book has a very dark start, so much so, I wasn't sure if it was going to be a book for me. However, I continued, and was so glad I did.

Told from the viewpoint of a number of extremely well written characters, the story begins with Lena, abducted, she has been held captive, in a cabin in the woods, along with her two children Hannah and Johnathan and their father, her captor.  She has miraculously found a chance to escape, and running through the woods to the road, is hit by a car and badly injured.

The driver has called an ambulance. Lena is taken to hospital, along with her daughter. All they can get from Hannah are their names.  Running a trace the police find a resemblance to a Lena Beck who went missing, after walking home from a party 13 years ago, and the detective who lead the missing persons case and her parents are called.

That is a brief re-cap and I will stop there, as so much of the wonder of reading this book is from it's structure and the way the author uses the perspectives from each character to build, continuously throughout the story, tracing out not only what is happening now, since her escape, but also during the time of her captivity.

There is an element of concentration needed for this but with such a well written book as this, and brilliantly translated I must add here, it is an extremely clever and gripping read.

The characters are so well thought out. Raw, vulnerable, sinister and the description of the chapters taking place within the cabin are frighteningly vivid.  The adults have that element of  being totally believable yet always , at the edge of my mind, wondering if they could be trusted. Hannah, who is particularly well written, is damaged and vulnerable but also slightly scary too!  This is a dark novel, but my investment in the characters and my need, to know how it ends, made me speed through this and I was utterly hooked.  When the part in the book that made me chuckle was the young girl deciding on which of her red crayons to use to draw the body on the kitchen floor, highlights the nature of this read but it is also much more than that. A great thriller and a great study of people.  Matthias' obsessive and sometimes destructive hope in finding his daughter, after all these years.  Lena's behaviour towards her captor and the damage captivity has had on the children, who know no different, is a real study to read.

An intense thriller that gallops along taking you on one hell of a ride!

You escaped. But your nightmare has just begun.

A windowless shack in the woods. Lena's life and that of her two children follows the rules set by their captor, the father: meals, bathroom visits, study time are strictly scheduled and meticulously observed. He protects his family from the dangers lurking in the outside world and makes sure that his children will always have a mother to look after them.

One day Lena manages to flee - but the nightmare continues. It seems as if her tormentor wants to get back what belongs to him. And then there is the question whether she really is the woman called 'Lena', who disappeared without a trace over thirteen years ago. The police and Lena's family are all desperately trying to piece together a puzzle that doesn't quite seem to fit.

The story begins with talk of the disappearance of 23 year old student Lena Beck, who has been missing for 13 years and her father has never given up on her. Fast forward to the night of the accident where a woman believed to be Lena is rushed to hospital after being involved in a hit and run, and she has a young girl called Hannah, her daughter with her. Could this be the breakthrough that the police and Matthias Beck have been waiting for, or is the nightmare only just beginning?

This book is told from the perspectives of Lena, Hannah and Mattias and, whilst it's very dark, mysterious and, at times, terrifying it's also, at times, confusing and you will need to concentrate whilst reading this one, to keep up with the plot. It's a great page turner with lots of twists along the way, involving abduction and regimented captivity, and a great debut novel for this author. It will definitely keep you guessing right to the very end!

I'd like to thank Quercus Books and Netgalley for the approval, I will post my review on Amazon and Goodreads.

Thanks to the publishers and Netgalley for this arc. I've heard many good things about Dear Child and so was eager to get stuck in. This is a psychologically gripping read about the effects of trauma, and the twisted ways families can function.
Dear Child opens with a prologue: 23 years-old Lena has gone missing in Munich. This then cuts to a scene many years later and we see a woman sitting next to her husband and children, planning how to kill her husband.
The story then starts from the POV of Hannah, 13 years-old, although she looks much younger than her age. Hannah follows her mum, Lena, into the ambulance. Her mum has been hit in a hit-and-run. It becomes apparent that Hannah hasn't had a normal upbringing. A therapist and the police are called.
We also follow Matthias, Lena's father, who gets a phone call from a friend of his who works in the police, and is told a woman whose name is Lena has been found and taken to the hospital. Matthias drives down to Cham, near the Czech republic, with his wife to identify the woman. Except she's not Lena...Then he sees Hannah who looks just like Lena...
The third POV is from the woman, who's also called Lena. But she's not Lena really. Slowly, slowly the truth emerges how she was abducted, taken to a windowless cabin of sorts, her hair was dyed blonde like Lena and her abductor cut her forehead with a knife to imitate the scar Lena had, and she was forced into Lena's role. This woman, who name we're later told is Jasmin, hit her abductor with a snowglobe and smashed his face in then ran and got hit by a driver. The man called the ambulance then when it arrived he drove off. But what happened to Lena...And is Jasmin truly free...
What really struck me about this book was the voices, especially Hannah's, who was brought up a certain way and has come to perceive the world in her unique way, is equally both harrowing and induces pathos. Her voice had me hooked. I also felt greatly for Jasmin who following her survival and escape now finds herself trapped and haunted by her traumatic capture, and Matthias who is still grieving the loss of his daughter with his wife. The characters are well-developed and you really feel for them all.
Plot-wise things unravel slowly, and is full of suspense and eerie. There's a nice little twist, too, in the last act of the book. It was post-twist that the story went off the rail for me and I just didn't understand the characters motivations for their actions anymore. I found the villain to be rather stereotypical and the final confrontation, which could've been full of tension, lost it's steam mainly because the villain's actions were so abrupt and conveniently senseless in contrast to the meticulous person we met in the flashback scenes, that the story lost my attention.
However a tedious ending aside, in comparison to most books this is one of the more original reads out there with compelling characterisations and a strong voice.

I really enjoyed this book and wish that I’d had time to binge read it. It did take a while for me to get hooked, but after that I loved it! The back of the book says “this thriller starts where others end” and I loved that! It’s a different way of writing a thriller and I really enjoyed it. It makes it more unique and it stands out from the rest. I loved the storyline and the way it was written, and I was completely shocked by the twist at the end. It was the last thing I was expecting and I never could have predicted it. I also really liked the characters and found it easy to feel sympathy towards them. I took away one star from my rating as I found some parts of the writing repetitive. There were several sentences that were repeated later on in the story, and this really distracted me. Other than the repetition there was nothing that I didn’t like about this book and I’m looking forward to reading more from Romy Hausmann in the future.

A dark, sinister and twisty thriller on the subject of abduction and abuse, very well told and leaving just enough to your imagination to keep you awake at night!

Review is on Goodreads and has been posted to Amazon, pending approval.

I went into ‘𝘋𝘦𝘢𝘳 𝘊𝘩𝘪𝘭𝘥’ not knowing what to expect - the tag line of this one is ‘𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘴 𝘵𝘩𝘳𝘪𝘭𝘭𝘦𝘳 𝘴𝘵𝘢𝘳𝘵𝘴 𝘸𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦 𝘰𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘴 𝘦𝘯𝘥’ 😱 which is so compelling and ominous, but I haven’t really heard anyone else talk about this! ⁣
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But, I have to say, I loved this. 𝐈 𝐥𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐝 𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐟𝐫𝐨𝐦 𝐇𝐚𝐧𝐧𝐚𝐡’𝐬 𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐩𝐞𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐞 especially- it was so interesting to see everything through a child’s eyes 👧⁣
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I do have to say that I don’t think this book will be for everyone. A lot of this book is covering all types of abuse and therefore if that is something which you can’t read, be sure to look up content warnings for this one! Also, as it is a translated novel, there are some phrases or word choices which are confusing, but overall I think the translation was done pretty well. ⁣
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The writing and plot is very fast paced at the beginning and end, but slows in the middle - however because of the perspective changes, it was constantly keeping you on your toes! There was just something about it, it was 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐩𝐮𝐥𝐬𝐢𝐯𝐞 for me and I couldn’t put it down! 📖 ⁣
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In terms of predictability - 𝐈 𝐝𝐢𝐝 𝐩𝐫𝐞𝐝𝐢𝐜𝐭 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐛𝐢𝐠 𝐭𝐰𝐢𝐬𝐭 in here in the first few chapters! However, there was a final twist that surprised me, so I still enjoyed the overall plot! 🔪⁣
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This one is definitely a thriller for those who want to read from the perspective of an escapee, it has domestic elements and is so harrowing to read about the abuse. I am really happy I read it and loved my experience, but some of the scenes here are hard to get through. ⁣
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⁣⁣CW: Physical abuse, Sexual Abuse, Rape, Murder ⁣

Following the story of an escaped kidnap victim who was forced to live out the role of mother and wife in a remote cabin, the story begins when ‘Lena’ escapes, which is typically the climax of the story. It really was a gripping thriller, moving between the different perspectives of the victim, one of the cabin children and the father of a missing woman who disappeared over 13 years ago. Whenever I thought I had guessed the next twist or turn, I was surprised.⠀
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If you fancy a thriller with a little bit of a change, I’d definitely recommend it. It’s quick, easy entertainment which is perfect for an isolation read.