#Orentober #Throwback #Review: The Home by Sarah Stovell @SarahLovesCrime @OrendaBooks #TheHome

It’s almost the middle of #Orentober and I am so happy that I am sharing a throwback review of Sarah Stovell’s most recent psychological thriller The Home!

Sarah Stovell was born in 1977 and spent most of her life in the Home Counties before a season working in a remote North Yorkshire youth hostel made her realise she was a northerner at heart. She now lives in Northumberland with her partner and two children and is a lecturer in Creative Writing at Lincoln University. Her debut psychological thriller, Exquisite, is set in the Lake District.
Follow Sarah on Twitter: @sarahlovescrime – it is so worth following Sarah because her tweets are hilarious!

When the body of a pregnant, fifteen-year-old is discovered in a churchyard on Christmas morning, the community is shocked, but unsurprised. For she lived in The Home, the residence of three young girls, whose violent and disturbing pasts have seen them cloistered away…
As a police investigation gets underway, the lives of Hope, Lara and Annie are examined, and the staff who work at the home are interviewed, leading to shocking and distressing revelations … and clear evidence that someone is seeking revenge.

The Home landed on my welcome mat on the 16th and I finished it on the 18th of October, I had just finished a book and it felt that all the bookish signs were telling me to immediately read the book. I’m not one to disagree with those who control bookish fate so I did, I plunged in to the story of three girls who live in The Home, and the mystery around the murder of a pregnant 15 year old girl. The first chapter reeled me in, it was then that I knew that I would be feeding the kids toast for tea.

The way that the novel is written is from multiple point of views, if you’ve read Sarah’s previous book Exquisite you’ll know how Sarah develops characters with such a depth that they make you feel a kaleidoscope of emotions, mainly to do with them as a person, but also about what these girls have experienced in such a short life. Hope, Lara and Annie are three fictional characters, but they’re built upon thousands of non – fictional children, the ones that experience constant change in foster parents, with a majority having a terrible start in life. This enhances the emotive essence of The Home, you can’t help but feel sympathy and a peak of anger at the heart-breaking lives of these girls, the faces of those vulnerable children clawing to survive. If you’re expecting a thriller that has a lulling beginning of happiness, you’ll be disappointed, The Home is an immediate dark tale of three individual’s living a life that they are desperate to escape, no matter what the path or consequences.

Sarah knits a sinister plot that is not only breath-holdingly suspenseful, but she also create an air of an untrustworthy atmosphere. Her attention to detail while unravelling the traumatic individual stories of the girls while keeping them all connected is an utter talent, especially while giving each character their own individual voices. I absolutely adore the psychologically twisted way that Sarah writes, her words will transport you into the novel until you finish the last page and left gasping for breath. The Home is a psychological thriller that will elicit a multitude of feelings, it’ll make you shout out loud and it’ll draw you in with its mystery and your curiosity of where the storyline is going to go. Yet again, Sarah Stovell has penned a mind warping psychological thriller that is literary magnificence. I highly, to the highest, recommend it!

Yet another quality read from both Sarah Stovell and Orenda Books! Thanks again to Orenda for posting me a copy and thanks to freshly out of a blog slump me, for the motivation to squeeze in an extra #Orentober review! It’s a team effort people!