200-word review of The Family Upstairs by Lisa Jewell
My rating: 3 out of 5 stars
Goodreads rating: 4.09 with 9,735 ratings (as of 11/22/19)
Be careful who you let in.
Soon after her twenty-fifth birthday, Libby Jones returns home from work to find the letter she’s been waiting for her entire life. She rips it open with one driving thought: I am finally going to know who I am.
She soon learns not only the identity of her birth parents, but also that she is the sole inheritor of their abandoned mansion on the banks of the Thames in London’s fashionable Chelsea neighborhood, worth millions. Everything in Libby’s life is about to change. But what she can’t possibly know is that others have been waiting for this day as well—and she is on a collision course to meet them..…more on Goodreads
200 Word Review
I was provided with a complimentary copy of this book so I could give an honest review.
Although I marked several of Lisa Jewell’s works “want to read”, I never got around to picking up one of her books. I was excited to be given the opportunity to review her latest, “The Family Upstairs”.
As of 12/3/19, it has a 4.05 out of 5 with almost 14,000 ratings. Maybe it was due to my wanting to read her books for years or the high rating but to say I was disappointed would be an understatement.
It is billed as a mystery/thriller. I may have enjoyed it if I had just considered it as a work of fiction, without the mystery/thriller label. I did not connect with the characters or with the story. I think this is mostly because I kept waiting for the mystery/thriller to begin.
The book itself was a quick read. Some reviewers had difficulty keeping track of the characters and the timeline. I did not and thought was easy to keep track.
I know most of this review is not exactly positive but I still plan to read another book by Lisa Jewell. I hope it was just this book I did not connect with and not the author.
This 200-word review was published on Philomathinphila.com on 1/13/20.
This review was published on Philomathinphila.com, Smashbomb, Goodreads, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, and Barnes and Noble on 1/13/20. When available, the review will be published on Scribd.com and, using Overdrive, will be rated in 9 libraries.
Genre: General fiction
Print Length: 349 pages
ISBN: 9781501190100
Publisher: Atria
Publication Date: November 5, 2019
Purchase at Amazon *** Barnes and Noble
One Comment
indiefan20
I gotta admit, when I read the sentence about her getting the letter she’d been waiting for all her life my first thought was ‘what, her Hogwarts acceptance letter got lost in the mail?’ Huh, maybe that’s just me then. I tend to avoid a lot of contemporary thrillers because they seem really formulaic to me, even to the point of having extremely similar titles and covers. My mom really gets into them though and I’m sure she’s read something by this author at some point. Great review! 🙂