Book Review: Daisy Darker by Alice Feeney
Daisy Darker
Author: Alice Feeney
Published: August 30, 2022
352 Pages
Reviewed By: Jessica
Dates Read: August 7- September 7, 2022
Jessica’s Rating: 5 stars
Book Description:
After years of avoiding each other, Daisy Darker’s entire family is assembling for Nana’s 80th birthday party in Nana’s crumbling gothic house on a tiny tidal island. Finally back together one last time, when the tide comes in, they will be cut off from the rest of the world for eight hours.
The family arrives, each of them harboring secrets. Then at the stroke of midnight, as a storm rages, Nana is found dead. And an hour later, the next family member follows…
Trapped on an island where someone is killing them one by one, the Darker’s must reckon with their present mystery as well as their past secrets, before the tide comes in and all is revealed.
Jessica’s Review:
Whoa, whoa whoa! Despite taking a month to read, I really enjoyed this one; especially the closer it got to the ending!
My reactions to the book went from:
I knew it!
Wait…. What???
What am I reading???
WHAT am I reading!?!?
WTF did I just read!?!?!?
And this was all in a good way! OMG, this is one of those books where once you finish it you have to read again so you can see things you might not have caught the first time. And I plan to read it again (at some point with that never ending TBR…..)
Feeney has been an author on my TBR list for a while and I have a few of her books, I just haven’t been able to get to her until now, and I am so glad I started with this one.
Our narrator is Daisy in both present day and the past. The Darker family has many issues, and Grandma (Nana) is a famous author. They are all coming together for her 80th birthday after a long time spent avoiding one another And the house (which is called Seaglass) Nana lives in is secluded when high tide comes in, so there’s no leaving Seaglass after dark! And on this night a storm comes in that is both outside and inside.
Just as the clock strikes midnight on Grandma’s birthday a scream is heard and everyone comes into the kitchen and finds Nana dead. There is a creepy poem written on the chalkboard in what looks to be Nana’s writing. The poem has some frightening and foreboding verses for the family to decipher. And then one by one as the night goes on the bodies begin to pile up.
That’s basically all you can say about Daisy Darker! It is a fast-moving story, yet also slow paced as the present-day events take place in just over a 12 hour time period, but each hour drags on as you don’t know what is going to happen and who is going to die next! For me there was definitely suspense as to what might happen next! The past is also important to what happens in the present.
Many thanks to the publisher Flatiron Books for sending me a copy to read and review! I really enjoyed it! And I hope to move some of Feeney’s other novels higher up on my TBR list.