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This book was something else!
Looking for a genuinely creepy and twisted thriller that you just can’t put down?

I always love being surprised by a book!

I’m so grateful to all the wonderful book bloggers who encouraged me to give it a chance because.. wow. The psychology behind many of these characters, topics, and situations is as fascinating as it is horrifying. I would definitely recommend this to fans of slow-building and decently paced thrillers.

Spoiler Alert!

Trigger Warnings:
Child-Domestic-Verbal-and Physical Abuse, Cult behavior, Rape, Murder

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The Family Upstairs by Lisa Jewell

Publication date: November 2019
Pages: 349
Genre: Thriller, Suspense, Psychological fiction
Standalone 

(Disclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. Any purchases made through my links may earn me a small commission at no additional cost to you.)

Socialite and husband dead in suicide pact
Teenage children missing; baby found alive

A young woman with a past shrouded in secrets.

On her twenty fifth birthday, Libby inherits the estate of her birth parents, an influential family with a once sizable fortune. Found poisoned, under questionable circumstances, next to the body of a strange man.. what has transpired in the home so many years ago still remains a mystery. With no clear sign of the other children’s whereabouts, the home lays empty, waiting for the baby to turn twenty five.

The house is three floors high, four windows wide. It is beautiful. But it is, just as she’d imagined it would be, boarded up. The chimney pots and gutters are overgrown with weeds.
The house is an eyesore.
But such a beautiful eyesore.

Martina Lamb, an unhappy socialite to a very wealthy man, allows a young pop star to use their home as the setting for her next music video. The arrangement was never supposed to last long, and as this young woman and her lover’s extended stay precipitates the arrival of a more sinister presence, the Lamb’s life will forever be altered.

But the thrill faded as the weeks passed, because long after the film crew had left, long after the single had dropped out of the charts, long after their next single dropped out of the charts, Birdie Dunlop-Evers, with her bead eyes and her tiny teeth, was still in our house.

Told mainly in the voice of a young Henry Lamb and the events that follow the fateful night a stranger comes into their home and a nightmare takes over their lives.

I had no idea, none whatsoever, how different the landscape of my life would look by the end of that summer and how all the things I’d been waiting for would soon feel like distant dreams.

When the Thomsen family arrive, making themselves at home, whispering promises of better health and a happier way of living. Small changes are noted at first, but an invisible power struggle erupts, and as tension grows between some of the family members and these new ‘guests’, things grow increasingly unpleasant for those who do not adhere to David’s carefully constructed new way of life.

I remember where it started, but I have no idea how we’d got from that night to the point nine months later when strangers had taken over every corner of our home and my parents had let them.

The dark circumstances at home only escalate, and when David attempts to justify the unforgivable, it’s the final straw for some. Desperate to escape the oppressive circumstances.. a plan is put in to motion that will have devastating consequences on all involved

It was a fork in the road, really. Looking back on it there were so many other ways to have got through the trauma of it all, but with all the people I loved most in the world facing away from me I chose the worst possible option.

Five Stars!

This book really makes you question.. How well do we really know our neighbors?

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Libby: Our lead protagonist. Found as an infant in a home of death and intrigue, she searches for answers to the mysteries of her past, and the family she never knew.
Henry: Main narrator. Mostly in the words of a frustrated boy, we follow his perspective as his family overrun by suspicious and sinister characters. (I, personally, felt as though Henry was our main character and that this was his story all along.)
Lucy: A woman struggling to provide for her two children does whatever is necessary to find her way back home, back to the haunting familiarity of her childhood, and hopefully a better future.
Birdie Dunlop-Evers: An unlikable character through and through.. she’s the catalyst to this family’s downfall.
David Thomsen: A handsome, charismatic, monster of a man that manipulates his way into a position of almost absolute power over the residents.
Phin Thomsen: Son of a monster, and well aware of it, Phin pushes back at every turn.. baiting his father’s dangerous temper.

About the book:

This book is eerily addictive. I felt challenged to question the characters, their secrets, and motives.. while new horrors and mysteries came alive on every page.

A slow beginning lulls you into a false sense of polite interest.. before the moments of increasingly odd behavior and unsettling changes create an atmosphere of tense disquiet. Momentum builds and plans unravel as the growing horror taking hold finds purchase in the chilling truth of what happened over twenty five years ago. Who can our protagonist trust?(Who can the reader trust?)
When the game is still afoot and pieces are at play for the children who survived in that house, and ‘those’ people, how much of Libby’s life was put into motion all those years ago?

Overall:

You know, I really didn’t have high expectations going in with this book. A lot of reviews commented on it’s ‘slow building tension’ and one remarked on ‘similarities to V.C. Andrews‘. I was curious.. but not invested. I should have known better.

Disliked: One thing that, I think, didn’t allow me to fully enjoy this was the lack of cohesion between the past and future POV’s. There’s a very nice flow for both, but when switching between the two, it was rather noticeable. Jarringly so. It does improve but did cause some frustration in the the beginning.

And can I just say.. What the hell was wrong with all of these adults that they would allow such treatment towards the children. Not just once.. but habitually? I consider this unacceptable. Those kids were failed by the people who should have protected them.

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So.. that’s it for now.
I hope my review was helpful(or at least entertaining)but, if you have any questions about it or the book, please contact me or comment below. I promise I don’t bite.

Happy Reading!

Favorite Quote: “I’d subliminally determined at this point that the only way to really know what was going on in the world was to listen to women talk. Anyone who ignores the chatter of women is poorer by any measure.“

I will definitely be reading more from this author in the future.

Summer break has began and schools have released their hostages..
What are you reading?

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