All You Ever Wanted

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When a strange woman turns up on Emily’s doorstep with their lost cat, she doesn’t think anything of it. This was riveting, also the stalker element was very uncomfortable but I recommend the audio as it for me adds to the story.

The back and forth between Emily and Anna really increased the tension as the ending got closer; just as Emily is coming to terms with things and being super accommodating to Anna, we read more about Anna behind the scenes, and I was starting to have a mini panic. Until reading this, I didn’t realise how much I needed to read about a character like this; a bit obsessive, a bit strange.I just wished Emily’s husband (or anyone) would see things from her point of view, to protect her and to reassure her when things got too much.

Yes there was a criminal element but this was more about the characters, the small family whose lives are disrupted by Anna.It’s also clear just how busy and pretty hectic Emily’s life is right now as she balances work and family life with her one-year-old daughter. There is a great skill in dropping the breadcrumbs of clues for readers to follow at the perfect intervals, masterfully timed. I think I need about 6 months to recover from everything, and I know I’ll be thinking about this book for an awful long time. When I read the synopsis for this novel I expected it to be similar to my usual type of book but it was a little bit different. The first person is Emily we hear a lot about her how she met her husband and got married and now have a child.

Part of me was questioning whether or not Anna was behind all this, or if there was something else at play here. This is such a dark and emotional read and i certainly wasn't prepared for how emotionally tied I would be to the characters. If you read something this excellent so early on, you just know the rest of the book will be a phenomenal read. Emily visits memories long forgotten, flashbacks from the past which help her to piece together her life, and it’s clear just how draining and shocking all this new information is for her. I knew this was my kind of book as soon as I started reading, and it’s absolutely one of my top reads of the year!This is a powerful book about a woman (Emily) slowly eroding through a drip-drip of poison both from outside forces and her own paranoia which may or may not be justified. If you love family drama, can’t-put-down thrillers and obsessive characters, you’ll adore this book! A big thing that stood out for me throughout the start of this book was just how perfectly crafted the many relationships are between different characters, and especially the relationship Emily has with herself.

I wasn’t mentally prepared for how much I became emotionally invested in these characters and their complex lives! Both Emily and her husband Simon work at the same school, though the couple recently had a little girl - Emily finds adjusting to motherhood and work life a little tricky.I was hooked from the first few pages, a great easy holiday read, I loved the change of narrator it was unexpected and actually needed. Plus Emily’s husband was seeing someone else when they met and there are those who don’t believe leopards change their spots fuelling her insecurities. I could see both points of view and understand to some degree why they reacted the way they did at certain points.