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DARLING GIRLS
Sally Hepworth
St. Martin’s Press
Publication Date: April 23rd, 2024
368 Pages
Goodreads | Amazon
This is my fifth book by this author and as much as I enjoyed the others I was kind of disappointed with this one. I am an outlier once again as I did not love this book as much as others have. I am finding it hard to give this a rating to because I was enthralled by the story and the main characters.
I did love the format of now and then chapters and having all three characters’ points of view. As is typical with me I enjoyed the then chapters a lot more than the present time. I felt like I got to know Jessica, Norah and Alicia through their younger years. They have a lot to be upset about but they stuck together no matter what they went through and that carries into their adult lives.
I get that fostering is a game of Russian Roulette, no one knows how a parent or child will meld and I know there are evil people in this world but Jesus are all of them that bad? Too much was over the top in my humble opinion, this could have been close to a four star rating except for that ending. The emotions I felt for the three main characters is the only thing that redeemed this book for me.
Hepworth certainly knows how to write a compelling plot but what lost me was what happened at the very end. I think it was added just for the shock value, I am not triggered by anything that I read I just thought it was really stupid and I didn’t buy into the no one knew it all happened in secret line that the author was trying to sell. Many triggers abound in this tale most notably child abuse as this is one messed-up story.
Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the Advance Readers Copy.
Susan Gentry
The ending was confusing to me. Was it thrown for shock value? To me for no one to know about Amy when she was alive was difficult to believe . What role did the psychiatrist play in the beginning. It just seems it was thrown in to confuse the reader until the revelation at the end. I did find the book entertaining but knew from the start, it was going to have a different ending
Tiffany
I’ve just finished and although I’ve really enjoyed all the other novels from Sally Hepworth, this one wasn’t great. I had to keep reading to know what happened but I found the interactions between the girls as adults were fairly juvenile and the humour that was trying to thread through was a bit lame. Some parts just seemed too coincidental and silly.
Its not a book I would recommend.