Story for the Week
To answer your first question: No, Corinne was not caught sneaking out of the house. 😉
Dennis spent many years living in New York, and he was a huge worrywart in general, so he worried a lot about crime. When we first bought our home, we called an alarm company to wire up a security system like he had in his home in New York. It included a motion sensor in the hallway, sensors on all the doors, and sensors on Corinne’s bedroom windows. As she got older, the running joke was that she would never be able to sneak out of the house, and then when we got Ring motion sensor floodlight cameras for the back of the house and a Ring doorbell, it just accentuated the fact that she would never be able to sneak out of the house.
I recently had all of the windows replaced, and I took the sensors off of her windows, so the new joke was that now she actually could sneak out her bedroom windows because we don’t have a floodlight on that side of the house. I told her that I considered that when I took off the sensors but I wasn’t worried. First, she could get out easily enough, but she would have a really hard time getting back in, and (the bigger deterrent) our neighbors do have a floodlight camera on that side of their house, and they always tell me when they see weird stuff in my yard.
So I’ve been wondering lately, why do kids try to sneak out of the house anyway? One of Corinne’s friends recently got in trouble for sneaking out—had to hand over her phone to her parents at night for weeks. My sister-in-law recently came to stay with us for a while, and she mentioned something about a time when she snuck out as a teenager. I asked her why she snuck out, and her response was, “For a boy.” 🤣
As you might have guessed, I didn’t try to sneak out as a teenager. Honestly, I will readily admit that I was pretty much a goody-two-shoes as a teenager 😇, and it never even crossed my mind. But I have talked to Corinne about it because I don’t want her to feel like she can’t ask to go places, to feel like she has to sneak out to have fun. We have a pretty good relationship in that respect, open lines of communication and all that. She knows that I’m more lenient than her dad was, and she’s a level-headed kid, so I hope that I don’t have to worry about her trying to sneak out as she gets older. She’s still pretty focused on doing well in school, so fingers crossed. 🤞
Christina McDonald’s first novel was a thriller about the night a teenage girl snuck out. She has a new release called Do No Harm that I’m looking forward to reading, and you’ll want to check out her first release as well.
Book Review
⭐⭐⭐⭐
4 Stars for The Night Olivia Fell by Christina McDonald
310 pages
Publisher: Gallery Books
Publication Date: February 5, 2019
I originally received an advance copy of this title from NetGalley and Gallery Books in exchange for an honest review.
Publisher’s Description
A search for the truth. A lifetime of lies.
In the small hours of the morning, Abi Knight is startled awake by the phone call no mother ever wants to get: her teenage daughter Olivia has fallen off a bridge. Not only is Olivia brain dead, she’s pregnant and must remain on life support to keep her baby alive. And then Abi sees the angry bruises circling Olivia’s wrists.
When the police unexpectedly rule Olivia’s fall an accident, Abi decides to find out what really happened that night. Heartbroken and grieving, she unravels the threads of her daughter’s life. Was Olivia’s fall an accident? Or something far more sinister?
Christina McDonald weaves a suspenseful and heartwrenching tale of hidden relationships, devastating lies, and the power of a mother’s love. With flashbacks of Olivia’s own resolve to uncover family secrets, this taut and emotional novel asks: how well do you know your children? And how well do they know you?
************
How well do we really know our children and what’s going on in their lives? That’s an over-arching theme in The Night Olivia Fell by Christina McDonald. The story begins with 17-year-old Olivia Knight falling, told from her perspective, and then the book alternates between Olivia’s perspective before she fell and her mother Abi’s perspective after Olivia fell. We meet Abi as she awakens to a phone call about Olivia having an accident. When she arrives at the hospital, she is told that Olivia is brain dead but that they can’t remove life support because Olivia is pregnant. 😮
It’s then that Abi realizes that she really doesn’t know what’s been going on in her daughter’s life. We learn a lot about Abi’s back story in her chapters—deserted by a mother who committed suicide when Abi was 10, raised by her sister, a teenage mom herself. Abi is an insecure and over-protective mother whose daughter has begun to rebel. Abi is determined to figure out what happened to her daughter, and when the police aren’t moving fast enough for her liking, she starts to ask questions herself.
I don’t want to give away anything because it is definitely an interesting story. There are a lot of potential suspects and a lot of possibilities for what happened—including the possibility that Olivia really just fell (or jumped?)—but Abi doesn’t think so. It’s a 5-star concept for sure and one that kept me reading.
What knocked this down to 4 stars for me were the writing style and Olivia’s chapters. The writing was overly melodramatic for me, like a soap opera: “Rage radiated out from him in waves. Adrenaline kicked hot and silent in my blood, and I leaned away, wanting to escape the vortex of his fury.” I’m sure there are those who like that style. Not my cup of tea, but everyone has their preferences.
In regard to Olivia’s chapters, I simply think the book would have been better without them. Keep the Prologue and maybe the chapter near the end where we actually find out what happened to Olivia, but the rest of Olivia’s chapters actually give away too much information. The book would be much more of a suspenseful whodunit without Olivia’s point of view telling us what we don’t want to know so soon. There’s enough context in Abi’s chapters to keep you guessing.
There were a couple minor characters who send flowers to Abi and approach her when she’s out for a run one day. They didn’t really add value to the story and could easily be eliminated. There’s also a detective who is helping investigate who Abi spends a lot of time with and their budding relationship is a little cliché but not really developed throughout the book for where they seem to end up.
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