BLOG TOUR: 'Lie With Me' by Sabine Durrant - SPOILER FREE

Welcome to my stop on the 'Lie With Me' blog tour! 

In May last year, I received a copy of 'Lie With Me' via bookbridgr, but unfortunately I didn't have the time to read it once it arrived. I was intending on going back to it, but with so many other releases filling my inbox it slipped further and further down my TBR. 

That's why I'm so grateful to Vero Norton for contacting me with this wonderfully exciting opportunity. It gave me a kick up the bum and made me prioritise this book, and I'm so glad that I finally picked it up because it is gripping.

'It struck me in the night that this might have started earlier.' 

I'm not a big fan of instant foreshadowing.
I often find that it's too cliched, giving away a huge part of the plot before the action can progress and before we can learn to care about the characters and what could possibly happen to them. If you know something bad is going to happen to someone, there's no point in wasting your hope that things might turn out okay.
In this instance, however, I thought it worked really well.
Paul Morris wakes up in the middle of the night, ruminating on something that has happened in his life. It's dark and disorienting, throwing you straight into the action. His voice is established within the first few paragraphs - he's a strong character, and you know exactly what motivates him within a couple of pages.

Paul Morris is the definition of a bachelor. He's always on the lookout for his next conquest, which is how he ends up going to the book store in Charing Cross: he sees a young redhead through the window, and decides to try his luck. 

He strikes out. He's embarrassed: how dare she not want him? He looks good for 42. He's a published author, a Cambridge graduate. A catch. 

When he bumps into old school friend Andrew, he's distracted. Andrew asks for his number to arrange a lunch and he gives it to him, wondering if the redhead behind the desk will be surrepititiously writing it down now she knows how successful he is. He doesn't want Andrew to contact him, and decides he'll decline the call when it arrives.

He lets his guard down, though, hoping to hear from a journalism student who wanted to wrack his brains for advice. Next thing he knows he's booked in that lunch date with Andrew and he's travelling across London and back into his past.

Arriving at Andrew's house, he meets Alice. He can't remember, but they've met before: ten years ago, when they were both on holiday in Greece. Alice and Andrew have a yearly pilgrimage back, taking both of their families on holiday to a villa that Alice owns: one that they won't be able to visit again, as developers are tearing up the property to clear the way for a new hotel complex. 

Alice is on a mission. Ten years ago, when they were all in Greece, a young girl named Jasmine vanished. She feels personally involved, as she was there to comfort Jasmine's mother in the hours directly following her disappearance, and she's been campaigning for the last decade to get the Greek police to do more to find Jasmine, who she's convinced must still be alive.

She's too old for Paul, but her drive turns him on. She has a villa in Greece, a huge house... She has a lot of money, and he's about to lose the place he's been living. He decides to seduce her, then when her daughter Phoebe goes to university he's hoping she'll invite him to lodge in the spare room. 

Their romance is a whirlwind one. Alice seems unconvinced to start with, inviting Paul to Greece and then refusing to mention the offer again despite his hints, but he pushes into her affections until he finally seems to have her under his spell. He gets the invitation to Greece, and he's certain he'll be able to move straight in as soon as they get back. Easy. 

But Paul starts to wonder if something's going on between Alice and Andrew. The long, lingering looks between them make him uncomfortable, and when he finds condoms in Andrew's bag he takes them, hoping he can stop the affair in its tracks. Then there's a rape on the island, and Alice and Andrew collude to cover up the potential involvement of Alice's son, bringing them closer and making Paul feel as though he's being pushed out...

Paul just wants her to trust him and open up to him, but she won't. He doesn't think it's fair: he's doing everything he can, granting her every wish, but she still seems to favour Andrew. He feels like he has to lie to her constantly, because she believes he has more money than he does - he wants her to have a high opinion of him, and is afraid that if she knows he's broke she'll no longer be interested. Keeping up with all of the falsehoods he's weaving is exhausting, and she still doesn't seem to care for him as much as he does for her.

Their beautiful getaway isn't really a holiday. Alice is so focused on the Finding Jasmine campaign that she barely has time for him, and tensions are rising between him and Andrew. The teenagers aren't making things easier: Louis is moody and uncooperative, while Phoebe and Daisy are constantly flaunting their bikini bodies.With family drama at the forefront of his mind, Paul can hardly relax at their villa, especially with the constant droning of the diggers working ever closer to Alice's property line.

The first third of the book is achingly slow, but as soon as Paul gets to Greece the tension becomes unbearable. 

I will admit, I almost gave up a few times towards the beginning. Paul is arrogant, and reading the story from the viewpoint of a man with such an inflated ego is exhausting. He thinks he's so clever, lying at every possible opportunity, but that gave me secondhand embarrassment. It was obvious that he was going to get caught out. That's the moral of this story: even the smallest lies catch up with you.

His constant scheming to get invited to Greece is also tiring. If he didn't get to go to Greece their would be no story, so all of the chapters where he's hinting his interest are unnecessary. He's so needy, refusing to outwardly ask if he can go, just desperately trying to manipulate her into wanting him there. I hate men who treat women as though they're less intelligent. Paul is one of those people who only sees women for their bodies, rather than for their minds. He's not attracted to Phoebe, Alice's teenage daughter, because she has badly dyed hair, so when she asks him about journalism he's dismissive and uninterested. 

If you haven't guessed, Paul is a hateful man. That's the point; because you know that bad things are coming to this irritating character, you're eager to see him experience his downfall. That's not to say that you'll celebrate it when it eventually happens, though. Sabine Durrant knows how to manipulate her reader's emotions, meaning that you care for characters you previously hated and despite those you thought you loved.

Bear with it. If you're hoping to read a thriller that is relentless in its intensity then this is not the book for you (but I'm going to be featuring one like that next week, so stay tuned!). Be patient: it pays off. 

Sabine's descriptions of Greece are delightful. It was raining every day I read this book, but I could feel the heat emanating from the pages and warming my soul, making me desperate for summer to hurry up and arrive. This is the perfect holiday read, so if you're going anywhere nice any time soon keep this book in mind. 

After you get through the dragging establishing chapters the book is a very quick read, becoming almost impossible to put down. There are subtle clues sprinkled throughout the story, but until you know exactly what happened it's difficult to pick up on them. As soon as you know everything makes sense - you can feel that last piece of the jigsaw puzzle snap into place, clearing the meaning that has been obscured throughout. 

It takes a very clever writer to create a story like this. The way that everything gets twisted to have a different meaning is mind-blowing, and if it hadn't been for the way that Sabine neatly tied up the loose ends and explained everything that had happened throughout, this would have been an instant reread for me. 

I'm not going to give spoilers, because this isn't a book that would be easy to enjoy if you knew what was going to happen. All I can ask you to do is to give it a chance. If I hadn't been reading this for a blog tour I would have given up, and after seeing how it all ends that would have been a huge mistake. 

I haven't read any of Sabine Durrant's novels before, but after this I'm craving more of her writing. Her characters are very authentic, and the way she weaves her plot is astounding. It's been a long time since I've read a novel with an antihero protagonist, and this is making me want to read books about hateful people - something I normally dislike doing. 

Also, just look at how gorgeous the cover is. How can you resist a book that beautiful?

'Hello, Goodbye and Everything In Between' by Jennifer E. Smith

*This review will contain spoilers!*

First things first, I need to say a huge thank you to Headline publishing for sending me a copy of this book through bookbridgr in exchange for an honest review. 

'No matter how strong her feelings for him, she refuses to rush the words. They're too significant, too definite, too lasting. When she finally says them, she wants it to be to the first, last, and only person. She wants it to count.'

Aidan and Clare have been together for two years, but with both of them departing for colleges on different sides of the country in the morning - him off to UCLA, her off to Dartmouth - they spend their last day together trying to work out what to do about their relationship. Clare is adamant that they should break up, because she doesn't want them to stay together and despise each other. Aidan is certain that they should stay together, because he loves Clare and he's certain that they'll be able to make it work - his parents were childhood sweethearts, after all. However, Clare's parents used to be married to other people before they found each other, and she doesn't want to risk missing out on meeting her 'one' if Aidan just isn't it.
Clare designs a list of places that they need to visit before they make a decision: a 'greatest hits' of their relationship, touring them from the place they met to the place that they had their first kiss. Clare puts all of her energy into convincing Aidan she's making the right choice for both of them, but when she starts to doubt herself will she be too late?
The first (and only other) Jennifer E. Smith book I've read was 'The Geography of You and Me', which I absolutely adored. I'd been expecting so much from this novel, because the concept was adorable - a mini road trip based on their relationship? Cute! - but unfortunately this one just didn't end up appealing to me that strongly.
I think the problem might be the time scale. While it's a brilliant idea, it makes it extremely difficult to care about their relationship: the flashbacks come quite regularly, but they aren't that detailed or lengthy, so it felt as though there were references to the things that they'd been through together, but there wasn't any solid evidence that made me believe they were a good couple or made me want them to work out.
I liked their best friends, Scotty and Stella, much more than I liked Aidan and Clare. Clare was self-obsessed, while Aidan was a bit of a meathead - they just didn't seem to get any deeper than that. On the other hand, Scotty failed to get into any of the universities he applied to, so his struggle with being left behind while his friends all learnt to cope with leaving was a cruel irony. Similarly, Stella tried to put up a front and be the uncaring tough girl, but she seemed to take it harder than anyone - made even tougher when you find out that her and Scotty have been secretly dating for two months.
Talking of Scotty and Stella: I thought Clare's automatic assertion that they should stay together was very irritating. They've been dating privately for a matter of weeks, while Clare and Aidan have been dating for two years, and she doesn't think they're worth the effort of a long distance relationship. Bit hypocritical...
I don't really have many complaints about this book, other than the boring characters and the utterly predictable conclusion - it was just overwhelmingly average. I've read a lot of contemporaries this year so far, and while it's not the worst it's certainly not the best. A bit of a non-entity, sadly. 

'Morning Star' (Red Rising #3) by Pierce Brown - SPOILER FREE REVIEW

If you haven't read my review of 'Golden Son', the second installment of the 'Red Rising' trilogy, go and check that out now - it's also spoiler free!

"Why would I care what you were? I care about what people do. I care about truth. If you have told me, I wouldn't have done a single thing differently. I would have protected you."

The only spoiler I'm going to put in this review is something that happens at the end of 'Golden Son', so if you haven't read the second book in the series you should seriously LEAVE, LEAVE RIGHT NOW, GO AND READ IT.
LEAVE, I TELL YOU.
GET OUT!
Phew! Now that outburst is over, I shall continue with the spoiler: you have been warned...

At the end of 'Golden Son', shit went down. A whole bunch of bloodydamn shit. But the biggest thing that went down? Darrow was outed as a Red.
Yep, you remember: our intrepid infiltrator was outed and captured by the Jackal, leaving the future of the Sons of Ares uprising in danger. I was shocked, dismayed, panicked... I basically went into fully blown meltdown mode, so it was a good job that I waited an entire year after the book published before I finally read it because I was waiting for 'Morning Star' to be here so I could read it straight afterwards.
And, in a surprising twist of events, I actually received an advanced copy of 'Morning Star' through bookbridgr and Hodderscape! It's still taken me ages to read it (it's over 500 pages, which is one of the longest books I've read in a long while...) but it was so exciting to be able to start it a couple of days early and dive straight back in on Darrow's adventures.
I'm not going to give any spoilers in this review, because I don't want to ruin this series ender for anyone - at least not yet, when it's been out less than two weeks... - but I might write a spoilery review in a couple of weeks, because I know I'm still going to be thinking about everything that went down in this novel.
All I can really say: this is a satisfying conclusion. Being a novel set in the midst of a space war, there are casualties - this means you will get your heart broken at multiple points, so be prepared! But that just meant that it was much more effective, because it wouldn't have been realistic at all if there hadn't been any losses of characters we cared about.
But the war isn't the only thing going on. We get lots of character development from characters we're already well acquainted with. In fact, there are only a few new additions to the cast, and they're all meaningful and necessary - there aren't any throwaway cannon fodder characters in this world! If you already love the characters from the first two books, you'll love this book purely because of the developmental arcs that they go through: they're all realistic, and no one has a random, unexplained change of heart purely for shock value. Everything is very natural, and that's brilliant.
I've been making an effort to finish series this year, and all of the series enders that I've read so far have been utterly disappointing. The authors haven't seemed to know where they were going, they've been too focused on wrapping up all of the loose ends, and they've all needed their characters to have a picture perfect happy ending. While the ending of 'Morning Star' is a happy one, it's also extremely bittersweet (you can't count that as a spoiler, anything could constitute a happy ending - I'm sure you won't guess exactly what happens!) and it's also very open: Darrow's story ends, and the plot that gets established in 'Red Rising' is finished, but it's only part of what is a much larger and wider story. We don't have a cliched "10 YEARS LATER" flash forward, but with the news that Pierce Brown is writing a new trilogy based in the 'Red Rising' universe (read more about that here, but the article does contain a couple of spoilers!) there's a lot of potential for what will be going on in the future.
I'm very, very happy with how this panned out. Getting to explore more of the universe (finally setting foot on Jupiter and Earth) was exactly what I'd wanted, but it wasn't over the top - there weren't random flights out to Pluto or Mercury just to show off the space-themed writing, so it made a lot of sense. I was torn between four and five stars for this final installment, because some of the political digressions and subterfuge went a bit over my head (betrayals in betrayals in betrayals, death begets death begets death) and it can be hard to keep track of everything that's going on... But compared with some of the final series books that I've read this year that I've had SO MANY problems with, I needed to reflect the fact that I only have one or two minuscule complaints - it would probably be closer to 4.5 stars, though.
If you haven't read the 'Red Rising' trilogy yet, I don't know what I can do to persuade you that it's necessary. There's a jellybean eating fox, goddammit! I can't recommend this series any more highly.