Good Afternoon All,

Happy Friday! It’s been my first week back at work after the Christmas break and my oh my has it been a struggle. Feeling better now it’s the end of the week and feel like I’ve settled back into routine. My sleeping patterns have been all over the place, which wasn’t helped by staying up until 1am reading this book.

Book 📖

Strangers by C.L. Taylor

I saw people raving about this book on twitter and I have a few other C.L. Taylor books on my TBR list so I was excited to give this book a go. Thank you to Avon Books UK and C.L. Taylor for this ARC in return for an honest review.

Book due for release on 2nd April, 2020.

Description 🔖

Three strangers live in the same city, all have their own troubles; all of them different. Ursula’s life has been on a downwards spiral since the love of her life died and she’s struggling to keep her life in control. Alice is a single parent, trying to get back into dating and is being stalked by who knows who. Gareth lives with his ageing mother who is suffering from dementia and suspects that his father who died years ago, is actually alive. All of these individuals will be somehow thrown together and become more reliant on each other than strangers ordinarily are.

General Thoughts 🤔

This book kept me guessing and questioning more than any book has for me in quite a while. I honestly had absolutely no idea where the story was going to go and how these strangers were going to eventually collide with one another. Once everything started to unravel I couldn’t stop, I had to keep on reading to wrap everything up in my mind.

I love the theme of strangers in this book. The age old classic is that it’s those closest to us that we need to watch out for but the frightening thing about this book is that strangers are probably more frightening. You have absolutely no idea what people are capable of; especially people you don’t know.

Characters 👫👭👬

There are a lot of characters in this book, but not too many that you can’t keep track of them all. The story is told through the voices of the three main characters; Ursula, Alice and Gareth. One of the underlying tones I took away from the story was that all three of them shared a common sense of loneliness which I’m sure resonates with a lot of real life strangers.

Another thing they all shared was standing in their own way. Alice refused to listen to the advice of her friends and family who were trying to help her. Ursula was living in the past instead of focusing on getting her life back together. Gareth was too afraid to go for what he really wanted. Frustrating to read when I just wanted these characters to pull it together and get their happy endings.

Writing Style ✍🏽

I adored the way this book just kept me guessing. I genuinely couldn’t even string together a theory on how the strangers were going to end up coming together. There were so many curve balls thrown in and so many red herrings I gave up on trying to work it out and just let it all unravel in front of me. Fabulous plot development I say.

Small thing I loved about this book is the last few chapters when all the tiny loose ends were tied off. As I got closer and closer to the end I kept thinking “but what about….and…but” yet everything came together.

Conclusion & Scoring 🎖

I’ve obviously been living on another planet as this was my first C.L. Taylor book. whilst everyone else has been enjoying this authors fabulous writing, I’ve been living under a rock. This definitely won’t be my last. Every bit of questioning and uncertainty I went through whilst reading this book was worth it!. Loved it.

😍😍😍😍😫