Megan Miranda has once again delivered a great story

The book is a slow burn, things happen and it is all very tense and eerie. However, the ending is anything but that! I greatly enjoyed reading this and would recommend it!

This was a book I randomly picked and I absolutely LOVED it, I couldn't put it down and it's a good thing we are in lockdown otherwise I would've been super tired at work. The main character Olivia was extremely likable and I thought it was genius how the author let us in on how people who had that sort of back story really feal.
It is so true! I realised whilst reading it that we do get invested in people like Olivia and we do want to know that they ended up having a good life and that there is some meaning to it all.
What I never thought about is how people like Olivia must feel with the intrusion we constantly want into their lives, especially on bit anniversay dates.
One of the things that really surprised me was the ending, I did not see it coming which is unuasal for me. I will 100% be buying her books

Interesting and intricate story,with lots of twists and turns. Believable characters and a look at how one incident affects many.

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Liz Barnsley rated a book really liked it

less than a minute ago

The Girl from Widow Hills

by Megan Miranda (Goodreads Author)

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Read in April 2020

A few books in and I think it's safe to say that I'm a huge fan of the way Megan Miranda writes and plots her psychological thrillers, The Girl From Widow Hills was a page turner of a read with an intriguing central protagonist. 

This author tends to turn her nose up at the general trend within unreliable narrators, Olivia doesnt drink excessively , doesn't pop pills at ridiculous levels nor does she conveniently forget things at just the moment it would reveal truths or act in illogical ways. This makes her journey authentic and believable, the twists when they come genuinely realistic and this is why I rate Megan Miranda highly.

Olivia is trying to escape her past as "The Girl From Widow Hills" swept into a storm drain as a child whilst sleepwalking, miraculously survived who then became a story. One her own mother was all to keen to cash in on. Now with her name changed, living a fairly anonymous and normal life, her random sleepwalking reemerges. She doesnt know why, but one night there is a dead body there in front of her...

The writing is wonderfully immersive, the tale unfolding hugely addictive. Did Olivia kill this man? Who is he? There are no monsters in her past, no danger she has been hiding from, just reporters and people who feel they own her life, but something has changed and she needs to know what...

This is clever because of that set up- it is unpredictable because there are no guesses to be made in the usual way - plus you have a hugely intriguing set of characters who can't be immediately placed into boxes and a single point of view to filter events.

Overall I really enjoyed this, it's a pleasure to read a novel that doesn't try to slap you in the face with a twist you will always see coming but simply unwinds the tentacles of one girl's life until the truth of it all becomes clear.

Recommended.

Twenty years ago six year old Arden Maynor from Widow Hills, Kentucky was swept away during a bad storm, her mother Laurel believed she had been sleepwalking. Three days later, she was found underground and clinging to a drain cover by Sean Coleman. She was injured but alive. The media go wild and her mother spoke freely to them over the years which was quite lucrative. Fast forward twenty years and Arden has changed her name to Olivia Meyer, she’s working as a hospital administrator in Central Valley, N Carolina. This is her story which backtracks through various sources to the incident that made her and her mother famous and in the present day where a series of terrible events occur which places Olivia and in danger but through this she learns her truth.

I like the way Olivia’s story is told as it’s tense, creepy, mysterious, intriguing and terrifying at times. She is ultimately a survivor, she’s stronger and braver than she realises as she’s had to put up with judgements, assumptions, jealousy and threats. She has trouble at times separating fact from fiction, the real memories from the false, and her state of confusion and lack of trust is well conveyed. She has lived with subterfuge, secrecy and lies since she was a little girl and this would mess with anyone’s reality. The story is full of twists, revelations and events that cause her to shutdown and panic at times. The ending is one I genuinely didn’t see coming and kudos to Megan Miranda for that!

However, there is some repetition especially in the telling of Arden’s story and the pace in the middle is a bit slow although the last quarter of the book makes up for that.

Overall, it’s a well written book, with interesting characters and an intriguing storyline which I enjoyed.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Atlantic Books for the ARC.