#NEW #RELEASE #NEW #REVIEW - The Girls in the Garden by Lisa Jewell today, June 7th!

Advance Praise

Lisa Jewell’s characters are so real that I finish every book half-expecting to bump into one of them. Modern, complex, intuitive, she just goes from strength to strength."– Jojo Moyes, author of After You

"An engaging and atmospheric read, Lisa beautifully conjures up the half-child half-adult lives of young teenagers."– Jane Fallon, author of Skeletons

"Oh but I loved this book -- a magical garden right in the center of the city, a long, hot summer simmering away, a group of young teens, lurching between boredom and passion and ripe for their lives to start. And at its center a dark and disturbing mystery that keeps you turning the pages long into the night. Lisa Jewell is the most compassionate storyteller. She writes with such lightness of touch, yet her books pack a powerful punch. A stunning, beautiful, mesmerizing book that everyone will be reading this summer."– Tamar Cohen, author of The Mistress's Revenge

"Lisa creates beguiling characters, which dazzle from the page. This is a terrific suspense story told with that brooding promise of danger that taunts us to read on, to chase the elusive truth at the heart of the book."– Rachel Hore, author of The House on Bellevue Gardens

"Another winner. Beautiful writing, believable characters, a pacy narrative and dark secrets combine to make this a gripping read."– London Daily Mail

Description

“Lisa Jewell's characters are so real that I finish every book half-expecting to bump into one of them. Modern, complex, intuitive, she just goes from strength to strength” (Jojo Moyes, New York Times bestselling author of After You).

Imagine that you live on a picturesque communal garden square, an oasis in urban London where your children run free, in and out of other people’s houses. You’ve known your neighbors for years and you trust them. Implicitly. You think your children are safe. But are they really?

On a midsummer night, as a festive neighborhood party is taking place, preteen Pip discovers her thirteen-year-old sister Grace lying unconscious and bloody in a hidden corner of a lush rose garden. What really happened to her? And who is responsible?

Dark secrets, a devastating mystery, and the games both children and adults play all swirl together in this gripping novel, packed with utterly believable characters and page-turning suspense. Fans of Liane Moriarty and Jojo Moyes will be captivated by The Girls in the Garden, the next unforgettable novel by New York Times bestselling author Lisa Jewell!

- You can see more at the author's website! Here: http://books.simonandschuster.com/The-Girls-in-the-Garden/Lisa-Jewell/9781476792217#sthash.CKwybR6O.dpuf

MY TAKE:

5 STARS!!!

I happen to LOVE Lisa Jewell’s writing. While reading her books, she has a way of pulling us, the reader, into her books so easily and we just get lost inside of them, and yep, there I was! Lost inside this book enjoying it VERY much!

This book starts off with two sisters, Pip and Grace, lovely girls, and their sense of adventure really makes you just love these girls even more! You can’t help but to feel as deeply as these two sisters do, and even their mother, Clare, loves these girls so much. Take Pip, for example, all she wanted in the beginning of the book was to see her father. She remembered the good times about them growing up, unlike Grace and their mother who did not quite remember things the way Pip did. Did Pip happen to forget her father and how he burned their family home down as he was standing in their driveway with a bad case of mental illness in which anyone who saw him would know that is what did it. So Grace and their Mom, Clare, were not so keen on wanting to see him. They remembered the way things were the real way, not by some imaginary fairy tale. When Pip said that, I could just feel how Clare felt, knowing how crazy her own husband turned out to be with their family and then hearing Pip wanting to SEE HIM? I could sense her apprehension in her voice and I could feel her digging her heels into the ground thinking NEVER! When it was suggested that perhaps Daddy started to feel better, oh NO! It was ALL their mother could do but to try to put it nicely into words that she did not think it was possible, and not for a long time.

In another breath, as good as the girls seemed, you could also feel a darker sense about them, and that may have been because of a gang of older teenagers who seemed to think they owned the gardens in the back of the houses, and they were ugly! They asked Pip why she had such a strange name, and naive Pip answered that is what her father called her, “Pip-squeak”, and it just stuck. She was teased relentlessly about that. I could also say the adults seemed a bit odd at times, too. They all questioned whether their children were safe out playing in the back without an adult present, yet all the rage was great that no one had to worry about their kids playing out back there. You could feel tension about the adults, though. You knew there were secrets, and I wondered if we were going to find them out through the kids? It made it hard to know where Lisa Jewell was taking us in this book. One person did care about the kids in the garden very much, and that was the girl’s mother, Clare. She had all sorts of things going through her head about the ‘maybe’ safety of kids playing in the supposedly ‘safe’ gardens. Yes, it was a nice place to live, but at the same time she had thoughts going through her head about a few buildings on each end of the gardens that housed the less fortunate and people who may be more apt to committing crimes. The best she could do as a mother was to make sure her girls knew to be careful of everyone, and Clare tried to keep an extra eye on the girls, too, but that wasn’t always possible. One day Pip comes upon Grace laying on the ground in a pool of blood. What happened? There is so much more to be learned throughout the book, but I don't want to give you anything more! This is for you to find out and see what you think! There were times when I thought the book could have been sped up a little bit more, but then again that is the way this author writes. I’ve read several of her other books and have enjoyed them very much. This is the first book of hers I have read that had children in it as much as this book does, or at least to the extent they were in this book as much.

I do want to mention this book is an ADULT Suspense book, NOT a Young Adult book AT ALL. Just because this book is about teenage kids in the garde quite a bit does not change the genre of this book. There were some very bad things that happened, and young adults do NOT need to reading about these unless you are very open with your kids and don’t want them to be naive about anything. I happen to love Lisa Jewell’s writing very much and I would not hesitate to highly recommend this very captivating book as an excellent summer read, or anytime read, for that matter! Enjoy! I surely did! I received this book for FREE from the Publisher, Atria, (and I thank them very much!) in exchange that I read then write a review about this book/what I read. "Free" means I was provided with ZERO MONIES to do so, but to just enjoy the sheer pleasure of reading this book and then writing an honest review about what I thought about this book, regardless if my opinion is positive or negative. I am disclosing this information in accordance with the law set here: http://www.access.gpo.gov/nara/cfr/waisidx_03/16cfr255_03.html The Federal Trade Commission's 16 CFR, Part 255, 16 CFR 255, Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising Federal Acquisition Regulation