{"id":2564,"date":"2013-05-01T01:57:20","date_gmt":"2013-05-01T05:57:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.fridaynirvana.com\/fiction\/?p=2564"},"modified":"2013-04-26T16:03:51","modified_gmt":"2013-04-26T20:03:51","slug":"book-review-the-other-womans-house-by-sophie-hannah","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fridaynirvana.com\/fiction\/2013\/05\/book-review-the-other-womans-house-by-sophie-hannah.html","title":{"rendered":"Book Review : The Other Woman’s House by Sophie Hannah"},"content":{"rendered":"

[amazon_link id=”0143121510″ target=”_blank” container=”” container_class=”” ]\"The[\/amazon_link]Title : The Other Woman’s House
\nAuthor : Sophie Hannah
\nGenre : Mystery
\nPublisher : Penguin
\nPages : 438
\nSource : Publisher
\nRating : 3.8\/5<\/strong><\/p>\n

Catriona Louise Bowskill (aka Connie) and her husband Christian, or Kit, live in beautiful Melrose Cottage in Little Holling, Silsford. Late one night, when Connie can\u2019t sleep she decides to view homes on a real estate site. In one of the virtual home tours for 11 Bentley Grove, a home that she is familiar with because of past associations, she sees a woman prone in a pool of blood. Horrified at seeing this gruesome sight on a public website, she wakes her sleeping husband. But, when he views the home tour again, there is no dead woman; the home is as normal as can be.<\/p>\n

Connie is a nervous self-doubter, given to worry and neuroses. She\u2019s been seeing a homeopath Alice for this, and when she confides her aggravating experience in Alice, Alice advises her to go the police. Everyone thinks that Connie is delusional, and the late night hour and her tiredness have contributed to her morbid hallucination. Connie herself is beginning to think it too.<\/p>\n

Am I going mad? Didn’t Anton hear any of what I said, about seeing a murdered woman lying in a pool of blood, and talking to a detective this morning? Why is no one telling him to shut up? Did nobody hear me? That none of them should have anything to say on the subject seems as impossible to me as what I saw on the laptop last night – impossible, yet real, unless I’ve lost my capacity to distinguish reality from its opposite.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The book is written in the first-person, so Connie is our unreliable narrator. She has been much put upon by her family; her parents are cold and petty in their disapproval, her sister\u2019s behavior oozes jealousy, and Connie is berated, in an underhand fashion, for being careless and uncaring. Only her husband actually seems to care for her, love her, but Connie has her suspicions about him too. She is surrounded, it seems by antagonists, and her thoughts and fears are bounced back at her with malice.<\/p>\n

This is an interesting setup for a story, when all we have to guide us through is Connie, and she isn\u2019t too firm with her own opinions. The author develops this as an atmospheric psychological mystery, with deep dives into Connie\u2019s psyche, her thoughts on her family and Kit, so much of the prose is written in a \u201cstream-of-consciousness\u201d kind of a way . Connie\u2019s familial relationship is minutely described, reminding me of the description of Frank Mackey\u2019s family in Tana French\u2019s \u201cFaithful Place\u201d<\/a>. The book\u2019s characters are quirky, and possibly crazy \u2013 we aren\u2019t sure though which of them are actually insane and which of them are just victims of circumstance.<\/p>\n

There are also sub-stories here, which didn\u2019t add any value \u2013 there is the Simon Waterhouse-Charlie Zailer angle, where we get to hear Charlie\u2019s thoughts on marriage and attachment, and homeopath Alice\u2019s strange attachment to Simon. We get to hear from unassuming Sam Kombothekra as he attempts to fill Simon\u2019s shoes for a while, and investigate Connie\u2019s mystery. If I have a bone to pick it would be that we get to hear the innermost thoughts of too many people, to the point where it begins to overwhelm the main story. I would have wished for better control of the main thread, and for better delineation between the parts that mattered and those that did not.<\/p>\n

Overall, I enjoyed this book; it kept me engrossed and guessing. I am a big fan of Ms. Hannah\u2019s poetry<\/a> because of how astute it is in deciphering emotion. She brings this commendable quality to this book too; her colloquial prose winds around delicately in description. There are a few places in the book where transitions are abrupt and it took me a few paragraphs to make sense of the locale and the people involved in a particular event. But overall, this book works very well as a gripping, psychological mystery; I read all of it in one sitting, staying up till the wee hours of the morning to finish it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[amazon_link id=”0143121510″ target=”_blank” container=”” container_class=”” ][\/amazon_link]Title : The Other Woman’s House Author : Sophie Hannah Genre : Mystery Publisher : Penguin Pages : 438 Source : Publisher Rating : 3.8\/5 Catriona Louise Bowskill (aka Connie) and her husband Christian, or Kit, live in beautiful Melrose Cottage in Little Holling, Silsford. Late one night, when Connie […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rop_custom_images_group":[],"rop_custom_messages_group":[],"rop_publish_now":"initial","rop_publish_now_accounts":{"twitter_17000648_17000648":""},"rop_publish_now_history":[],"rop_publish_now_status":"pending","_uag_custom_page_level_css":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[85,71,53,3,58,45,97,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2564","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-85","category-4_star_rating","category-arc","category-books","category-crime","category-mystery","category-penguin_books","category-review"],"aioseo_notices":[],"uagb_featured_image_src":{"full":false,"thumbnail":false,"medium":false,"medium_large":false,"large":false,"1536x1536":false,"2048x2048":false,"post-thumbnail":false,"sow-carousel-default":false},"uagb_author_info":{"display_name":"amodini","author_link":"https:\/\/www.fridaynirvana.com\/fiction\/author\/admin"},"uagb_comment_info":0,"uagb_excerpt":"[amazon_link id=”0143121510″ target=”_blank” container=”” container_class=”” ][\/amazon_link]Title : The Other Woman’s House Author : Sophie Hannah Genre : Mystery Publisher : Penguin Pages : 438 Source : Publisher Rating : 3.8\/5 Catriona Louise Bowskill (aka Connie) and her husband Christian, or Kit, live in beautiful Melrose Cottage in Little Holling, Silsford. Late one night, when Connie…","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fridaynirvana.com\/fiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2564","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fridaynirvana.com\/fiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fridaynirvana.com\/fiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fridaynirvana.com\/fiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fridaynirvana.com\/fiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2564"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.fridaynirvana.com\/fiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2564\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2575,"href":"https:\/\/www.fridaynirvana.com\/fiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2564\/revisions\/2575"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fridaynirvana.com\/fiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2564"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fridaynirvana.com\/fiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2564"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fridaynirvana.com\/fiction\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2564"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}