Dear Amy

I would like to thank Netgalley for an advance copy in return for an unbiased review. Dear Amy is a bit of a curate's egg of a book, in that it has good and bad elements, though mainly it is well worth reading if you like psychological thrillers. The main character of Margot can be exasperatingly wordy at times, though to me this became quite an endearing trait after I got used to it and deliberate on the part of the author. Some people seem take umbrage at the unrealistic parts of this book but not all books have to be kitchen sink domestic dramas and the world would be a boring place if they were. There are far too many psychological thrillers out there that are obsessed with scenes where the heroine does domestic chores for pages and pages and this novel was relatively free from that, with a pretty tough heroine and not the wilting abused wife type so common in these kinds of domestic thrillers. Personally, I prefer the plot to be unpredictable, even if that sacrifices some of the realistic elements of the story because - guess what? - ALL books are made up and not real, even the ones that fool you into thinking they are! Sophie Hannah comes under attack for this all the time by people who don't understand that she's not trying to tediously replicate/document real life but take an intriguing What If? puzzle and create the plot around that puzzle, even if it seems unrealistic at times.

I didn't guess the main twist but the secondary one stood out a mile though this didn't affect my enjoyment of the book and the ending certainly accelerates into an exciting conclusion. Overall, not a book for those of us who demand utter realism from our stories; nor those who want simple, instantly likeable protagonists who visit their grandma every Sunday for lunch. But if you want something a bit different, a tad more Latinate in its prose style, and are willing to suspend disbelief, then this is the book for you.