If you like books that keep your stomach tied up in knots, then you will enjoy all of these.
The Woman Outside My Door by Rachel Ryan.
A young mother is repeatedly told she is overwrought when she worries about her son’s new granny. The problem is, both his grandmothers have died, and one of them passed away only six months ago. The boy talks to his new granny on the phone and he meets her in the park, but his mom and dad never see her. His dad says its all in the boy’s imagination. He’s just grieving. Nothing to worry about. But mom worries anyway. Something is not right here.
As the boy’s parents cope with work, parenting, marriage, and their past histories they cannot reconcile their different perceptions of the new granny. This story takes lots of twists and turns before coming to a dramatic and surprising ending.
This is a fast-paced story that will keep you enthralled as the mystery unravels.
From a Buick 8 by Stephen King.
Stephen King knows how to make the incredible credible, and in this story we are convinced that there is a car that sometimes comes to life. When it does, the temperature goes down and bright light streams out from the car and the storage shed where it is kept. It may even make people disappear; we’re not sure. One person has definitely left town inexplicably, but maybe he just wanted to get away. Maybe.
This car may also give birth, kind of. Sometimes odd things appear in the shed after a bright light incident, and sometimes they don’t. The people who watch over it are state police officers, and they have all agreed to keep the whole thing secret. They do this for years and in the process we get to know them all quite well. We like them, so we don’t want anything bad to happen to them. That’s why you have to keep reading to the very end.
The Push by Ashley Audrain.
New motherhood is fraught with insecurities at the best of times, but sometimes a mom doesn’t immediately fall in love with her new baby. She does all the right things, but struggles to bond with this new little person.
The Push imagines what it would be like if that disconnect continues into the child’s early years. As we watch this mother and her child, we start to think that maybe her hunches are right. There is something unlovable about this child; but that is a terrible thought. Children are innocent, right?
As time goes by, the mother is repeatedly told she has the wrong idea, and that the child would be a lot happier if mom would just try harder to be more loving. But then things go from bad to worse.
This book was sometimes hard for me to read because it filled me with dread, but it was a page-turner that kept me enthralled to the very end.
Snowbird of Paradise 