Are You Awake?
Are You Awake? Well, if I’m not, I’m going to chalk this up as a pretty ridiculous dream!
Mary Collins is a mom of two under two on maternity leave from her job as a family lawyer. By her own account, she hasn’t really slept for two years, and she thinks of her husband, Jack, as little more than deadweight at the moment.
Tim Darbandi, is a senior foreign correspondent who’s on long-term leave from his paper while he recovers psychologically and physically from a Syrian bomb attack. He’s also really not slept in years.
One thing to know about these two, because it will be repeated incessantly for the first quarter of the book: They’re tired. Really, really, reeeally tired. It’s amazing that they can function at all, they’re so tired. Despite their unending tiredness, these neighbors both end up in a park near their homes at 4 AM peering up at a lit window of a home where they both believe they’ve seen a young woman, Samantha Ellis, recently reported missing in the news.
After getting skepticism and no help whatsoever from the police, these two barely functioning adults decide the best course of action is to amateur sleuth this thing in the most ill-advised ways possible that get them in trouble over and over again, because that's what intelligent adults do. 🤦♀️
In ‘Mum of the Year’ fashion, Mary occasionally brings her nursing three-month old son and her continually screaming two-year-old daughter who either speaks Caveman “HOT, MUMMY!” or beyond her years sentences “WHO IS THIS MAN, MUMMY?” along on her potentially dangerous snooping. When they aren’t with her, she’s shuffled them off to her friends to continue investigating the disappearance of a girl she doesn’t know with her neighbor she’s just met, while continually whining about her mom guilt.
Tim, on the other hand, seems like a fairly stand-up kind of guy when he’s not spying on his ex-wife, Alice. He means no harm. I guess he’s just checking up on her between his Sherlock Holmes adventures with Mary. It’s never really explained.
I’ve run out of energy to delve further into this. I’ll spare you my entire rant about the ending which has the collective logic of storing ice cream in a heated oven. Despite my complaints, I did want to see how things wrapped up rather than DNF’ing it, so there was enough intrigue to keep me turning pages.
As for the characters? I liked Tim. That’s it. Unfortunately, he wasn’t enough to save this.
★★ ½
Thanks to Amazon Publishing UK, Thomas & Mercer, NetGalley and author Claire McGowan for the opportunity to review this honestly. It's now available.
Mary Collins is a mom of two under two on maternity leave from her job as a family lawyer. By her own account, she hasn’t really slept for two years, and she thinks of her husband, Jack, as little more than deadweight at the moment.
Tim Darbandi, is a senior foreign correspondent who’s on long-term leave from his paper while he recovers psychologically and physically from a Syrian bomb attack. He’s also really not slept in years.
One thing to know about these two, because it will be repeated incessantly for the first quarter of the book: They’re tired. Really, really, reeeally tired. It’s amazing that they can function at all, they’re so tired. Despite their unending tiredness, these neighbors both end up in a park near their homes at 4 AM peering up at a lit window of a home where they both believe they’ve seen a young woman, Samantha Ellis, recently reported missing in the news.
After getting skepticism and no help whatsoever from the police, these two barely functioning adults decide the best course of action is to amateur sleuth this thing in the most ill-advised ways possible that get them in trouble over and over again, because that's what intelligent adults do. 🤦♀️
In ‘Mum of the Year’ fashion, Mary occasionally brings her nursing three-month old son and her continually screaming two-year-old daughter who either speaks Caveman “HOT, MUMMY!” or beyond her years sentences “WHO IS THIS MAN, MUMMY?” along on her potentially dangerous snooping. When they aren’t with her, she’s shuffled them off to her friends to continue investigating the disappearance of a girl she doesn’t know with her neighbor she’s just met, while continually whining about her mom guilt.
Tim, on the other hand, seems like a fairly stand-up kind of guy when he’s not spying on his ex-wife, Alice. He means no harm. I guess he’s just checking up on her between his Sherlock Holmes adventures with Mary. It’s never really explained.
I’ve run out of energy to delve further into this. I’ll spare you my entire rant about the ending which has the collective logic of storing ice cream in a heated oven. Despite my complaints, I did want to see how things wrapped up rather than DNF’ing it, so there was enough intrigue to keep me turning pages.
As for the characters? I liked Tim. That’s it. Unfortunately, he wasn’t enough to save this.
★★ ½
Thanks to Amazon Publishing UK, Thomas & Mercer, NetGalley and author Claire McGowan for the opportunity to review this honestly. It's now available.
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