Helen Monks Takhar

This is a workplace rivalry book, We have Katherine a woman in her forties who is an editor of a magazine which has just been taken over, she has just come back to work after being off with MH issues, and Lily in her twenties, Lily is an intern and the niece of the new owner and she basically wants to destroy Katherine.
This is told in both Katherine and Lily’s POV and what I first thought was just going to be a rivalry between the different ages turned out to be more sinister.
I didn’t like either character all that much, and I did struggle to get through this, I had to keep putting it by to read something else, it was a little slow. It was dark and twisty with secrets but it wasn’t for me.… (mere)

This was a creepy one that did an excellent job of looking into all the extremes we can see in relationships between different generations, and the way that both paranoia and gaslighting can work. I don't think the ultimate payoff in the ending held up and made it worth it. This was very much an analysis of two mentally ill women, which kind of made the book lose a lot of its creepiness and just become plain sad. While I did race through the last quarter to get to the reveal, I set this down at 47% and could have forgotten it quite easily.… (mere)

Rose, the daughter of a scam artist, lost everything when her father died. Now she and her mostly unemployed husband struggle to make ends meet in a neighborhood turned upscale by the presence of an exclusive school, the Woolf Academy.
Despite her social insecurity and his difficulty fitting in, she applies for her son to attend the Woolf and he is accepted. There are strange goings on here, including a tight group of women called The Circle who run the school, the death of one of them, and their charismatic but suspicious and overbearing leader. Soon Rose is called upon to enter The Circle, but at what price?

Many have really liked this book; I am an outlier. It was well written with twists and turns but it just wasn’t for me. I really had to force myself to stay with the book as I found it tedious. I couldn’t get invested in the story; most of the characters were unlikable and I just didn’t care what happened to any of them. Incidentally, I the saw genre of this book as more of a horror story than a mystery.

Thanks to #Netgally and #RandomHouse for the ARC.… (mere)

Precious You probably appealed to me most of all because of the workplace rivalry aspect. There's something rather fascinating about the way young whippersnappers swoop in and everything is theirs for the taking, forcing the old guard out to grass.

Katherine is 41, the editor of Leadership magazine. Lily is 23 and one of a raft of interns working with Katherine, but Lily is different. She almost entrances Katherine, causing ructions from day one.

From the very beginning of this novel it feels like something is very off about these characters. We know in the first chapter what has happened later on in the story. I think I'd have preferred to let it unfold from beginning to end, but having said that it definitely got my hackles raised early on.

I couldn't help but sympathise with Katherine. Don't get me wrong, I wasn't at all fond of her but to watch everything she had worked for being systematically stripped away by Lily was absolute car crash fiction. Very hard to read but I couldn't stop.

With Katherine providing the majority of the story, with interjections from Lily, this is such an incredibly introspective novel and I must admit to sometimes finding it hard to engage. Yet then it would pull me right back in, leaving me wide-eyed at what was taking place. To be honest, there were times I wanted to throw the book across the room (but I'd never do that to a book, of course) - I felt such a visceral reaction to what was occurring. I was furious on Katherine's behalf.

This is a book that will divide people. Actually, it divided me. I was a bit repulsed, a bit freaked out, a bit angry, and for the most part I was gripped. It's actually quite frightening, the hold some people seem to get on others, like a dog with a toy that they won't let go of, slowly ripping it to shreds. It's a chilling story of workplace jealousy. I hope I never meet anyone like Katherine or Lily!… (mere)