The Birdcage by Eve Chase

 

Pages: 400

Publisher: Penguin

Released: 28th of April 2022 

Kat, Flossie and Lauren are half-sisters who share a famous artist father - and a terrible secret.

Each has found their way of burying it. Over the years they've grown apart, and into wildly different lives. But an invitation to Rock Point, the Cornish cliff house where they once sat for their father's most celebrated painting, Girls with Birdcage, reunites them.

Rock Point is a beautiful, windswept place, thick with secrets, electrically charged with the one subject the family daren't discuss. And there is someone in the shadows watching the house, their every move. Someone who remembers the girls in the painting. What they did.

The sisters must unlock the truth to set themselves free - and find each other again.

What I Have to Say 

This book was a bit of a flop for me. I liked the setting a lot. It really captured the windswept cliffs of Cornwall well and the weather that was backdrop to the whole book was described really well. I also liked the characters. It was easy to get to know and care for them. But what really put me off was the way the cliffhangers were handled. 

So every few chapters we'd leave the present day story and go back to see what happened to Lauren in 1999. A lovely way to drill up tension and occasionally leave the reader on a cliffhanger desperate to read on, right? Well it would have been if every single cliffhanger hadn't resolved with the characters all safe and happy and the author telling the reader how the cliffhanger had resolved. It's like every bit of action that happened was only half written. I'm not completely against telling. It can work in some circumstances. But in the case of this book, I wanted to stay in the drama and actually see how it was resolved. 

There was also a bit at the end that didn't quite make sense. Something was explained about the grandfather and it was only in one paragraph without much detail. It seems like the sort of thing they might fix before the finished copy though. 

All in all, not the best read for me. 

My thanks go to Penguin and Netgalley for providing me with this copy for review.