Little Darlings

If you are looking for a weekend read that will keep you riveted, this is it!!

Oh my goodness, the lengths a mother will go to find her children is exhaustible, and never to be underestimated! This book will take you on some twists and turns that you were not expecting, and leave you wanting more!
Get ready to lose track of time and get lost in a book that will make the hair on your head rise!

My best friend bought me audible for Christmas and she could not wait to give it to me so I have been digging for gems since I got it. This is one of those gems in the Plus Catalog. Lauren Tranter is the new mother of twin boys, Morgan, and Riley. She is overwhelmed, experiencing postpartum depression and if that was not enough, one of the nights while she is still at the hospital, a young woman with twins wants to exchange/take her babies. Lauren runs away and hides in the bathroom and calls the cops. Of course, no one can find the woman and her babies. They all think it was Lauren hallucinating. She is tired, she was given medications during delivery so the conclusion is that she was imaging the whole event. DS Jo Harper reviews the report the next morning and something about the event pushes her to meet Lauren and to further investigate it. Jo believes Lauren. She knows something happened to Lauren at the hospital. Sadly, her boss does not agree with her and using the police resources is not something he wants to agree on. Jo does not want to leave the case and she starts using her own free time to follow some leads. What I loved about this novel the most is the folklore details that the author infuses in this modern tale. Lauren quickly becomes an unreliable narrator and it adds so much more to the story.

Then the unthinkable happens her twins are missing and or stolen and Laurens fears come to life. The span of the children being gone is very short and the children are quickly found, still in the stroller, looking the same and unharmed but the new mom knows they are not her children. All and all this read is worth the time and energy and is very uniquely written.

The premise of the book is so interesting. It's based on the fairytale A Brewery of Eggshells but it covers so much more than that. It tackles the topic of children, motherhood, and the struggles that follow. It's creepy, there's a mystery, and there's the question if the narrator is reliable. All things that usually I love. However, I couldn't say I loved this one.

I'll begin by saying that I listened to this on Audible and highly recommend if you like audio books. The narrator did a great job and raised the creep factor for me. I so felt for Lauren and her journey becoming a new mother to twin boys. So many women are faced with hardships after birth but it's rarely talked about. And Lauren had twins! The author did a good job portraying that. There's a creepy story about a drowned village....I'm here for it! It was a ghost legend that had you wondering if it could be true. This book between two perspectives; Lauren Tranter (the mother of newborn twin boys) and Joanna Harper (the detective that gets wrapped up in the Tranter family as multiple issues happen that involve the police). I think this helped the book to set up the question if Lauren is a reliable narrator. I also really disliked her husband and I always think books that bring out strong emotions (either good or bad) are a positive.

The real issue I had with this one is that by the end of it I did not feel satisfied. There's a lot of questions I felt that were left open ended. I think this was done to leave up to interpretation of the reader but it didn't sit well with me. We went on this long journey and learned all of these things only for none of it to really be put to use. I wasn't sure if this was a ghost story or a story of a troubled woman. I may be alone in this and to others it was completely apparent, but I just think it fell flat for me.

Overall, I did enjoy listening to this and would recommend to people who like folklore, fairytales, ghost stories, and psychological thrillers.

Some mixed feelings here, and I should probably give it a day or two before I review it. I must state for the record that “thrillers” and I don't get along. It's not for lack of me trying.

Problem number one was that I was under the impression that this was a horror novel. It is not. It's a police procedural with (maybe) some magical realism. I guess, if I wanted to pretend this book had some meat to it, I could say it's putting a lens on postpartum depression. Maybe.
I think it lost me early on when Lauren, who I guess used to just sculpt and take walks all day for a living, gives birth and assumes that her husband will help out. Apparently, this was never discussed. It's not like the twins were a surprise birth. There seems to be no plan, so when things start to go bad, they go bad pretty quickly.
Lauren's husband Patrick is over the top with bad qualities. I got tired of hearing news reasons to dislike this guy. Harper is the cop on the job, and honestly she doesn't really get to the bottom of anything and we are given a ton of backstory on her and her career and none of it matters. Finally, there is a side romance that also seems to be a bit of an add on. It all just seemed to go on and on with no point. So many red herrings: names of rivers, heat waves, old story books, dead mice as baby playthings?, audio clips, CCTV footage, skulls in the water etc. It didn't all add up.
Not my cup of tea. Even as a summer read.
I didn't hate it, it just wasn't to my taste.