Sunday 12 April 2020

Book Review: HAVEN'T THEY GROWN by Sophie Hannah


ABOUT THE BOOK


All Beth has to do is drive her son to his Under-14s away match, watch him play, and bring him home.

Just because she knows her ex-best friend lives near the football ground, that doesn't mean she has to drive past her house and try to catch a glimpse of her. Why would Beth do that, and risk dredging up painful memories? She hasn't seen Flora for twelve years. She doesn't want to see her today, or ever again.

But she can't resist. She parks outside the open gates of Newnham House, watches from across the road as Flora and her children Thomas and Emily step out of the car. Except... There's something terribly wrong. Flora looks the same, only older. As Beth would have expected. It's the children. Twelve years ago, Thomas and Emily were five and three years old. Today, they look precisely as they did then.

They are still five and three. They are Thomas and Emily without a doubt - Hilary hears Flora call them by their names - but they haven't changed at all.

They are no taller, no older... Why haven't they grown?





MY THOUGHTS

I am struggling to rate HAVEN'T THEY GROWN, so I've decided to go straight down the middle with 2.5 out of 5 stars.

The blurb certainly caught my interest: How *do* you explain seeing young children that do not seem to have aged in 12 years? Wanting to discover the answer is what had me turning the pages.

If I take all the individual components that led to the conclusion, I could convince myself that most are probable, but putting it all together and believing it as a whole was a hard sell.  I did not buy into it.

In general, I found the writing engaging, if a tad repetitive at the start. This was my first Sophie Hannah book, but I am interested enough to want to read more of her work.



ABOUT THE AUTHOR


Sophie Hannah is a Sunday Times and New York Times bestselling writer of crime fiction, published in forty-nine languages and fifty-one territories.


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