Audiobook Review: None of This is True by Lisa Jewell
None of This is True
Author: Lisa Jewell
Narrators: Full cast narration with music and sound design
Published: July 20, 2023
Audiobook: 10 hours 20 minutes
Reviewed By: Jessica
Dates Listened To: March 25-31, 2024
Jessica’s Rating: 3 stars
Audiobook Description:
Celebrating her forty-fifth birthday at her local pub, popular podcaster Alix Summers crosses paths with an unassuming woman called Josie Fair. Josie, it turns out, is also celebrating her forty-fifth birthday. They are, in fact, birthday twins.
A few days later, Alix and Josie bump into each other again, this time outside Alix’s children’s school. Josie has been listening to Alix’s podcasts and thinks she might be an interesting subject for her series. She is, she tells Alix, on the cusp of great changes in her life.
Josie’s life appears to be strange and complicated, and although Alix finds her unsettling, she can’t quite resist the temptation to keep making the podcast. Slowly she starts to realise that Josie has been hiding some very dark secrets, and before she knows it, Josie has inveigled her way into Alix’s life—and into her home.
But, as quickly as she arrived, Josie disappears. Only then does Alix discover that Josie has left a terrible and terrifying legacy in her wake, and that Alix has become the subject of her own true crime podcast, with her life and her family’s lives under mortal threat.
Who is Josie Fair? And what has she done?
Jessica’s Review:
Dang, I’m in a rut for my reviews! The next few are not positive reviews, this one included.
I had heard others mentioned that the audiobook was the way to go for this novel, and I waited a few months for it. But it was not worth the wait for me.
The only reason I gave it three stars is because of the full cast narration/ music/ sound design. I don’t think I would have finished it otherwise. This is one if I had known what should have been a trigger warning I would not have picked up: Pedophilia, and there was a lot of it!
There are mentions of podcast and a Netflix show and this is where the music and sound design definitely added to the story!
The premise sounded like one I would be interested in, especially dealing with the ‘birthday twins’ but it just wasn’t for me.
Purchase Links:
Amazon US
Amazon UK
Book Review: The Family Upstairs by Lisa Jewell
The Family Upstairs
Author: Lisa Jewell
Published: November 5, 2019
340 Pages
Reviewed By: Kim
Kim’s Rating: 3 stars
Book Description:
Soon after her twenty-fifth birthday, Libby Jones returns home from work to find the letter she’s been waiting for her entire life. She rips it open with one driving thought: I am finally going to know who I am.
She soon learns not only the identity of her birth parents, but also that she is the sole inheritor of their abandoned mansion on the banks of the Thames in London’s fashionable Chelsea neighborhood, worth millions. Everything in Libby’s life is about to change. But what she can’t possibly know is that others have been waiting for this day as well—and she is on a collision course to meet them.
Twenty-five years ago, police were called to 16 Cheyne Walk with reports of a baby crying. When they arrived, they found a healthy ten-month-old happily cooing in her crib in the bedroom. Downstairs in the kitchen lay three dead bodies, all dressed in black, next to a hastily scrawled note. And the four other children reported to live at Cheyne Walk were gone.
The can’t-look-away story of three entangled families living in a house with the darkest of secrets.
Kim’s Review:
This was my book club’s pick for March and my first Lisa Jewell book. And what a disappointment. This is another one that had all the makings for a great ending with a crazy twist and a drop mic ending and then it just went wah-wah. It was so anticlimactic and the characters were flat. By the time I was done, I sat there and asked, “so why did I read that?”
There was one interesting subplot near the middle of the book and that kinda saved this from being a total loss. Lucy was legit the only even remotely interesting character, but like all the rest, her ending felt incomplete. I just wasn’t impressed and I can’t say that I recommend it even as a generic murder mystery.
Purchase Links:
Amazon US
Amazon UK
