Fi comes home one day to find a moving truck in front of her house, unloading the belongings of strangers. Only Fi didn’t sell her house…

“Something horrific is taking place, she thinks. Knows. Knows in her bones.”

This is not the type of book I’d usually read but the blurb sucked me in. I wanted to know Fi and Bram’s backstory, to figure out how and why this had happened.

Beginning with Fi’s discovery that her house is no longer her house, this story then takes you back to the beginning of where it all went wrong. Fi’s story is told via a podcast that she and her friends all used to listen to before her life became an episode. Bram wrote his own version of events.

I don’t usually finish books when I don’t like any of the main characters. I’m all for loving characters or loving to hate them, but don’t tend to want to get to know fictional characters I wouldn’t want to sit down and have a conversation with. I made an exception for Fi and Bram, neither of whom I’d meet for coffee.

After hooking me in the beginning, the story dragged in the middle. I decided to stick with it and am glad I did because it picked up towards the end. I saw some of the twists coming. The ones I didn’t see coming didn’t surprise me when they arrived; my response was more that how the plot was unfolding made sense rather than there being any jaw dropping.

I can see why people enjoy books like this one. There’s dysfunctional family dynamics, betrayal and people pushed beyond their limits. I still don’t think it’s really my type of book (if the characters had made the decisions I probably would have, there wouldn’t have been a book in the first place), but I like wandering outside of my reading comfort zone every so often to see what I’m missing. I probably need to do it more often.

Thank you so much to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster for the opportunity to read this book. I’m rounding up from 3.5 stars.