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Bloody brilliant.
The Girls in the Garden
Simon and Schuster
7th June 2016
Imagine that you live on a picturesque communal garden square, an oasis in urban London where your children run free, in and out of other people’s houses. You’ve known your neighbors for years and you trust them. Implicitly. You think your children are safe. But are they really?
On a midsummer night, as a festive neighborhood party is taking place, preteen Pip discovers her thirteen-year-old sister Grace lying unconscious and bloody in a hidden corner of a lush rose garden. What really happened to her? And who is responsible?
Dark secrets, a devastating mystery, and the games both children and adults play all swirl together in this gripping novel, packed with utterly believable characters and page-turning suspense. Fans of Liane Moriarty and Jojo Moyes will be captivated by The Girls in the Garden, the next unforgettable novel by New York Times bestselling author Lisa Jewell.
A gripping page turner that is very very English and very very good?
WOOO!
I love Lisa Jewell, I’ve read a few of her books before and have become a fan of her work. She usually writes along the line of chick-lits and fluffy romances, but The Girls in the Garden is her first foray into a more serious, dramatic psychological thriller-esque story. It kind of worked. It gripped me and I was caught up in the story but you could tell it was written by someone with a softer sort of back ground.
As always with Lisa Jewell, the characters were so complex and so well thought out it feels like you knew them in real life. She takes her time building up different personalities they become so rea; and so vivid. The main character of Pip is a masterpiece. Pip is an 11 year old girl and the story is told through her eyes, with letters to her absent father included in almost every chapter, you experience the story unfolding with the same wide eyed innocence and scepticism she has.
The book starts in a suitably dramatic way, a year into the future where Grace (Pips 13 year old sister) is found half naked and covered in blood in the communal gardens of the flat (or apartment, if you prefer) where they live with their Mum. It isn’t known if Grace is alive, or if she has been murdered and it certainly grabs your attention. As the story unfolds, Jewell introduces many characters that live in the block of flats, with several of the teenage characters and the older men straight away being ear marked as being linked with what happened to Grace in the first chapter.
The communal garden is really at the centre of the story, being the link that ties all the characters together. The story is full of secrets, questionable behaviour and dodgy relationships and it all links back to the gardens. If you read my review of Hold Still a week or so ago, you will know that I can usually guess the end result of abook like this fairly easily, but with the Girls in the Garden I genuinely had no idea. Each character was built up so well that it really could have been anyone, I won’t spoil anything for you but it is a perfect ending.
Honestly, the book is really good. One of the main parts I like is how very English it is, it is full of 
English slang and references to pop culture, British stores and food. While that works for me, now that it’s being released to a US audience I feel like it might not translate as well. You may need to get up urban dictionary to figure out what the insults mean, but hey you can learn what minger, tosser, gutted and pleb mean! So this book is also borderline educational!
So, go read this book and immerse yourself in the world of a real psychological thriller and the wonderful world of British insults.
Pip Pip and Cheerio x
(Just so you know, this book was originally realised in the UK in 2015 under the title ‘The Girls’, it is now being released in the states under the new name ‘the Girls in the Garden’.)
