Lisa no se puede creer la suerte que ha tenido al encontrar una habitación ideal de alquiler en una casa espléndida. Y Martha y Jack, los propietarios con los que compartirá hogar, son una pareja de lo más amable y atenta. Pero este sueño hecho realidad comienza a peligrar el día en que Lisa se topa con la nota de suicidio de un hombre oculta en su habitación. Cuando les pide explicaciones, Martha y Jack niegan que la habitación estuviese ocupada antes de su llegada. Ante su firmeza y convicción, Lisa duda de sí misma... hasta que empiezan a ocurrir cosas extrañas. Y cuanto más crece su afán por descubrir la verdad, más claro tiene que hay alguien dispuesto a todo con tal de impedírselo.

Gaslighting. It's something that people in my own family have used against me. It thoroughly enrages me that humans have the cruelty within them to use such a horrible method of satisfying their own chueco agenda.
In this fiction story, Lisa's own parents are gaslighting her. She has attempted suicide, in the beginning of the story, and now she feels imprisoned by her parents' constant vigil over her. She is always troubled by a memory from her fifth birthday, where, she was told by her parents, she fell into farm machinery on a farm in Sussex. She has wicked scars that cover her body, and in her memory, she hears shouting, and the screams of children and the howling of a maddened woman. It's this that causes her anorexia, her sleepwalking, her depression.
But when she keeps after the memories, trying to find their source, and inadvertently stumbles on some of the pieces of a puzzle that holds out the hope of finding more, that's when the gaslighting starts.
I liked this part. Lisa is renting a bedroom in a house that she believes holds the key to the truth about her past. The owner of the house is a woman in her fifties, married to a much younger man, and she is reluctant to let go of the power over men that her beauty granted her when she was younger. The nextdoor neighbor is filling Lisa in on Martha and Jack's marriage after Lisa introduces herself to "Aunt Patsy" and her cats.
2019 Paperback Bloodhound Books
P.62:
"my jubilation at finding out there was a previous tenant nose dives when the older woman adds, 'mind you, queen bee in her brass Castle had blokes coming in and out of her place like it was Piccadilly circus. All times of the night as well. It only stopped when she got her hooks into that dumb toy boy she parades around on her arm.' her tongue clucks in disgust. 'Fancy a woman her age taking up with a young lad like that. Her Fanny better be topped up with botox because getting between the sheets with her isn't going to be a pretty sight.' " ( )

Probably slightly higher than three stars probably but I can't quite give it four stars. It has a lot of plot points that I just don't enjoy but I don't think it's a bad book by any means.

In thrillers, I tend to not really enjoy thrillers centering around mental health issues in the main character, whether the illness is real or not. It's not that I think those can't be interesting plots, I just tend not to like them because of the similarity to unreliable narrators which I don't like. There's also another twist in this that I figured out very quickly that is a plot point I don't like. The main character is adopted but her parents don't tell her that. As soon as she mentioned that her parents didn't have any childhood photos, I knew she was adopted. I know this is probably unintentional but I feel like these sort of plots make adoption look bad and as a plot point it is super overused.

The writing style also just felt weird to me in a way I'm having a hard time pinning down. Some of it worked really well with the plot. The story felt frantic at times and so did the writing. But some of it just felt overly choppy. Some of the plot points felt completely irrelevant by the end and there were so many plot conveniences. the one that bothered me the most was when Alex just happened to have a key to Lisa's house and took pictures of the writing on the wall before it was painted over. It left me feeling very unsatisfied with the conclusion. I thought most of the book was pretty good and the plot was engaging and thriller for the most part. But I think the sign of a good is thriller is when the answer is revealed, you can look back and see the signs you may have missed. Unfortunately in this book, some stuff seemed to just come out of nowhere, especially with the event in Lisa's past. I just left the ending a bit unsatisfying.

Throughout this book I mostly enjoyed it aside from the plot points that I tend not to like and I would definitely read another book by this author. I mostly just didn't like this one because of my own preferences but it definitely wasn't a bad book. ( )

While browsing Audible one day for an audiobook to listen to, I stumbled upon Spare Room by Dreda Say Mitchell. The book synopsis instantly had me hooked, and I knew I had to listen to this book. I ended up liking Spare Room very much!

Lisa is a young women with some psychological problems. However, she is determined to make it on her own without relying on her parents. When she spots an ad in the newspaper for a spare room in London for a great price, she inquires about the room and ends up living there. After finding a suicide note in her room, Lisa decides to find out more about this man while trying to figure out her own murky past. However, all this will place Lisa in grave danger.

The plot for Spare Room was highly interesting and written very well. Mitchell did a fantastic job at making it easy to transport readers into the setting. I felt like I was with Lisa every step of the way. The pacing, for the most part, is decent, and I found myself having to know more. There were a few spots were the pacing slowed, but for the most part, this book had a lot of action. I had to know more about Lisa's past. There were times I was questioning whether Lisa was sane horrific things happen to her or if she was just losing her mind. There were quite a few plot twists. Some were predictable, but others, I never saw coming. All of my questions were answered by the end of the book, and there were no cliff hangers which I was happy about.

The characters in Spare Room all felt realistic and like they were real people instead of characters in a novel. Mitchell did such a great job of breathing life into each individual character. Lisa was such a complex woman. I admired her tenacity to find out the truth at all costs even when she had everything going against her. Her determination was fierce, and she never let anyone get in her way. Alex was a sweetheart, and I loved how caring he was towards Lisa and how much he helped her out. Lisa's parents cared for Lisa, it was obvious, but I found myself wishing they would go about helping Lisa in better ways. Martha and Jack were fantastic! I always found myself not trusting Martha even though she came across as completely innocent to begin with, and I was always wondering if Jack really was as bad as Lisa thought he was. Patsy was probably my favorite character. That old woman reminded me of my grandma a lot of the time.

The narration, done by Kristin Atherton, was pretty good for the most part. I felt like Atherton started out the beginning of the book a bit flat, but she quickly got better. Her accents and voice changes for different characters were fantastic especially for the characters of Jack and Patsy.

Trigger warnings for Spare Room include violence, animal murder, attempted murder, murder, suicide, alcohol, some sex (though not graphic), profanity, and gas-lighting.

All in all, Spare Room weaves an interesting story with a fantastic cast of characters that will suck you right into their world. I would definitely recommend Spare Room by Dreda Say Mitchell to everyone aged 16+ who loves a great solid story. ( )