Featured Review

            WARNING: This is an outlier review.

            On the eve of her first art exhibition in the small town of Hope Falls in England, Eden Fox goes out for a late afternoon jog. When she returns to Spyglass, an old house she and her husband recently moved into, everything has changed. And her house key doesn’t fit.

            Unfortunately, that’s not all that doesn’t fit in this plot-twisting, whiplash-inducing novel from Alice Feeney.

            When Eden knocks at the door, she finds not only another woman living there who claims to be her husband’s wife, but her own husband doesn’t recognize her.

            Really?

            The locks were changed, and a new woman moved in all during the timespan of a 45-minute jog?

            Then the narrative backtracks six months to London where a woman named Birdy simultaneously learns she has a terminal illness and has also inherited Spyglass from her grandmother’s estate. She also comes upon an upstart clinic claiming it can predict the date of a person’s death.

            Gradually, if not painstakingly, these two timelines meet up, and Birdy becomes involved in the mystery of one house, one husband, two women. And that’s where the narrative begins inserting more twists than a Chubby Checker dance. (Chubby Checker? Look it up.)

            The problem with too many plot twists is that the storyline becomes completely unbelievable. Yes, it’s fiction. But even fiction must be ground in some form of reality. And while the multitude of plot twists kept me curious, they completely negated any enjoyment in the reading.

            If Feeney was looking to establish a record for the most plot twists in a single novel, she likely accomplished that. But she also assembled (again, in my opinion) one of the most confusing and convoluted narratives I’ve ever read.

            Two stars. Just too strange for me.