I read quite a few of Sara Shepard's
Pretty Little Liars books and enjoyed them, and I definitely enjoyed the
FreeForm series. So I was excited when I saw that she was coming out with a new book, especially one that sounded right up my alley. It's been a while since I've finished a book in a day, but I definitely stayed up past my bedtime to finish this one.
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| (Source: Kelsey Darling) |
Eliza Fontaine is about to release her debut novel, The Dots. The Dots tells the story of Dot and her aunt Dorothy who are extremely attached to each other; until Dorothy just up and leaves one day and Dot is left to figure life out for herself. Eliza is quite proud of her book. So then why does she jump into a pool when she can't swim? Her family thinks this is just another suicide attempt, she has a history of this behavior. However, Eliza swears she was pushed and no one believes her. So it is up to her to figure out this crime by herself. She enlists the help of Desmond, the man who pulled her from the pool, to figure things out. But her family is extremely unhelpful with trying to solve this, and extremely resentful toward her book. The deeper Eliza digs, the more she tries to uncover, the more confused she gets. People are confusing events from her life and Dots life, but how is that possible? Will Eliza ever figure out what happened at the pool? Is there a deeper connection between Eliza and Dot than she realizes?
The thing that I really liked about
The Elizas was the alternating chapters between Eliza's life and chapters from The Dots. There were parts where I was definitely more interested in The Dots and I wished I could have just torn through that. But I was very committed to both stories, especially when details started to overlap. I didn't want to believe that Eliza was crazy, but I was also having a hard time believing that any of this was actually real and that her parents were right.
One thing that did put me off a bit was how macabre Eliza and Dot were. They reminded me of Abby from NCIS, but more depressing, less eccentric.
"Desmond narrows his eyes at the miniature carousel wedged between the guesthouse and the wall. I found it on eBay; it's a replica of an Allan Herschell from the 1950s, except it's got psychotic zebras, a pissed-off swan, and a lion without a head...
'It works if you want to ride on it. The song it plays sounds like 'In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida.'" (p. 31)
"I loved the place when I first moved in with my mother-we'd bought it for a steal at a sheriff's sale; it was haunted, apparently, which is why no one else wanted it....A giant brass candelabrum stood in the middle of the dining room table, each red candle melted into pools of bloody wax. There were gory, dark-red stains on the upstairs Oriental rug that I prayed were blood. A pergola in the backyard looked like it had been chopped up with a dull axe. There was a little cemetery out back filled with little stones marked secrets; I dug them up and found no graves. Shaky script was on the inside of the closet walls in the bedroom that became mine. All of the handwritten messages were facts about death: within three days of dying, the enzymes that digested your dinner begin to eat you. What a remarkable person who lived here before us, I'd thought with glee. We could have been best friends. (pp. 115-116)
Don't get me wrong, I am far from normal. I find certain creepy things interesting and great statement pieces. My favorite shirt is a rib cage full of flowers and I have a necklace of an anatomical heart. But a headless lion and love letters about death are far from kitsch.
All of that being said, I think she found the perfect man in Desmond and I was rooting for them from the beginning.
"We cook dinners together, weird gourmet things that involve cheesecloth and double boiling and cauldrons-one of the nice things about living in an apartment actually owned by fifty-year olds is that they have nice cookware. On day two of our courtship, Desmond builds a special shelf for my via times, and I move them in. We read from a book of epigraphs from fifteenth-century tombstones. We put on Halloween masks (a gorilla and a pug, from Stefan's closet) and sit on the balcony, waiting for people to notice us." (pp. 222-223)
While Desmond's interest with macabre items is less so, and he is more into Comic Con and DnD, I am happy that they found each other, even though the circumstances are much weirder than her gruesome carousel.
There are plenty of mysteries to keep the book interesting from the first page to the last. Was Eliza pushed or did she try killing herself? Who is keeping Eliza from finding out the truth and why? Who is the person that Eliza keeps seeing that looks vaguely familiar? Why did Dorothy disappear for so long? Why did she randomly come back? Why does Dot's mother not want Dorothy around? One of these answers, you don't get until the last few pages. In classic Sara Shepard style, she does not just give you the answers, she makes you work for them; but you are not disappointed.
Rating: 8/10
Author:
Sara Shepard
Genres: Mystery, Fiction, Thriller
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