Book Review (5 Stars) – The Long Weekend, by Jane E. James

Blurb:

A remote lighthouse. A divided family. A chilling secret.

Making sandcastles has never been so dangerous…

Hazel Ladd has spent her life hiding the love she feels for one of her daughters and disguising the hatred she feels for the other. After fifteen years apart they all meet up for a long weekend. Hazel’s guilty secret is finally torn from her and the long-anticipated reunion ends in disaster.

All she’d ever tried to do was protect her daughters from the truth…

Set against the haunting backdrop of a wintry Norfolk coastline and a remote lighthouse that overlooks the bleak North Sea, this is a disturbing portrayal of a deeply complex mother with a secretive past, whose longed-for reunion with her two estranged daughters is not all it seems…

My Review:

The Long Weekend is actually the first paperback in my 2017 Physical Book Challenge. Since getting a Kindle a few years ago I’ve been terrible at reading actual physical books with paper pages that require me to move my hands to turn, and don’t get me started on the bookmark that kept trying to hide from me. The point of this challenge is I have to aim to read two physical books each month, and the first new book I start each month must be a physical book. It was a pleasure to begin this challenge with this wonderfully dark and disturbing 5 star read.

This story is about a rather divided and dysfunctional family who agree to meet up at a remote lighthouse for a long weekend. I started this book thinking the lighthouse was going to be spooky and the mother and her two grown-up daughters were going to have lots of arguments. I was not prepared for what actually happened within the pages of this book. Each night I read it, the story would sneak into my dreams, and haunt me throughout the day until I had time to read more of it the following night. This book completely took hold of my mind for the whole time I was reading it.

The Long Weekend has a clever plot with well-developed characters that you’re unsure whether to trust. I kept changing my mind about the characters, which had me feeling rather uneasy throughout this story.

If you think your family has issues, you need to read this book to help you put things in perspective!

I’ve admired this book cover for many months, regularly looking at my own paperback copy. Needless to say, it sent a shiver down my spine, when I suddenly noticed the silhouettes of a mother and her daughters on the cover after closing it once I’d reached page 83. It was a proper “Where did they come from?” moment.

This book turned out to be so much more than I expected it to be. This is an emotional and psychologically disturbing tale that I think many will enjoy and be pleasantly surprised by. Definitely an easy 5 stars from me.