The Family Upstairs

Genre: Mystery

Book Type: Physical

Author: Lisa Jewell

Pages: 352

Publisher: Atria Books (November 5, 2019)

Book Description:

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.

Twenty-five years ago, police were called to 16 Cheyne Walk with reports of a baby crying. When they arrived, they found a healthy ten-month-old happily cooing in her crib in the bedroom. Downstairs in the kitchen lay three dead bodies, all dressed in black, next to a hastily scrawled note. And the four other children reported to live at Cheyne Walk were gone.

In The Family Upstairs, the master of “bone-chilling suspense” (People) brings us the can’t-look-away story of three entangled families living in a house with the darkest of secrets.

Thoughts:

I love Lisa Jewell and was greatly looking forward to this book, so it’s been hard for me to write this review (which may also attribute to the delay in writing it). I always LOVE her writing style, the way it alternates characters and goes from past to present, she is simply one of the best. That alone kept me going in this book, but the overall story just wasn’t my favorite. It was very cult-like and very good and entertaining, full of twists and turns that you know you’ll get (and I did enjoy), but I normally find her books somewhat believable, and I had a hard time with the character of Martina.

The story in itself always ties together perfectly, I liked the surprises, but it came back to, “Did I really think things would happen like that?” When I first finished the book, I was left not really believing it, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized the that the thing with a dominating person who controls things is that nobody does understand why others don’t speak up or leave a situation. From that point of view, I loved the character of Lucy and the fight she had to do right for her children. I admired her strength and the sacrifices she made to try to make things better for her children.

Overall, while this wasn’t my favorite Lisa Jewell, as noted above, her writing style is one of my favorites. The story itself made sense and worked, even if it did challenge my way of thinking. Then again, isn’t that why I read? To do exactly that, and challenge my mind to view situations I hope to never encounter, but to find some type of compassion and understanding? For those reasons, this was still a good read for me.

Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️/⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️