Cannonball Read 17

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

A dark topic, but ultimately not as depressing as you might expect

Then She Was Gone by Lisa Jewell

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*WARNING, THERE MIGHT BE SPOILERS.  NOT REALLY MAJOR ONE BUT IF YOU WANT TO KNOW ABSOLUTELY NOTHING BEFORE READING THE BOOK, SKIP THE REVIEW I read three Lisa Jewell books in succession more than ten years ago.  They just seemed to pop up a lot in my  favourite second hand book store.  From what I remember, they were more or less “chick lit”, some twists but mostly focused on romance.  They were light, fast reads, and I liked them but was not totally wowed by […]

Reading isn’t always a good idea while wearing eyeliner

Then She Was Gone by Lisa Jewell

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When she was 15, Laurel Mack’s beautiful daughter (and favourite child) Ellie left the house to go to the library and never returned. Written off as a runaway by the police, in the years since Laurel has lost what was left of her family – divorcing her husband as she couldn’t stand how he was able to get on with things, and withdrawing emotionally from her surviving son and daughter due to her inability to deal with her own grief. Getting through her days by […]

A change of pace by being straightforward

And Then She Was Gone by Lisa Jewell

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I really enjoyed this book, although I have to admit not quite as much as the first of Jewell’s I read (Watching You). It’s strange to read a book about a mystery where the “who” and “what” are exactly what they seem, it’s just a matter of filling in the “how” and “why.” Mysteries by definition are all about piecing things together; there’s a reason they’re often dismissed as “whodunnits.” Here, without giving too much away, we know exactly who is to blame for Ellie […]

What is happening?

The House We Grew Up In by Lisa Jewell

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I’m not even sure where to start with this one. Typically, I would summarize the plot, but I’m not sure I know what happened. I may have fallen asleep and missed something, but I’ll give it a whirl – A quirky family of six live in a house. Their family seems to revolve around their Easter celebration, until one year, tragedy strikes. Mother and Father divorce. They split the house in two and Father moves next door. Mother invites her girlfriend and her child to […]

When reading replaces all of your plans for the weekend

The Family Upstairs by Lisa Jewell

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I picked up The Family Upstairs one morning intending to read a few pages to see what it was like. I put it back down again 200 pages later only to go to sleep, and the carried on in the same fashion the next day. Libby has just turned 25 and has inherited a house in Chelsea from the family she never knew – as a baby she’d been found in a crib with the bodies of her birth parents and another adult apparently dead […]

Giant Rabbits, Foot Wounds, and Loose Ends

The Girls in the Garden by Lisa Jewell

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Two young girls and their mother move to a neighborhood featuring a communal park after their father/husband commits a serious crime leaving their family home in ruins. The girls meet an eccentric group of children with an even more eccentric group of parents, a perverted grandpa called Puppy, and an old lady with a giant rabbit. Weirdness ensues. The story begins leading the reader to believe they will be consuming a page-turning murder mystery/thriller; however, this reader found herself struggling to push to the unsatisfying […]



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