Clara is only 7 years old, and she is concerned. She is concerned because her sixteen-year-old sister, Rose, has been missing for a couple of weeks after an argument with their mother. And now she's concerned because a strange man just brought some boxes into her neighbor's--Mrs. Orchard's-- house. She doesn't think he should be there, and Clara still has to feed Mrs. Orchard's cat.
Mrs. Orchard gives us her perspective. She is Clara's neighbor, and was recently put in the hospital for what sounds like might be heart trouble. We find out pretty quickly that Mrs. Orchard has died, but we continue to read chapters from her perspective while she was in the hospital. She mostly reminisces about when she was a young wife, desperate for her own children. She befriends her neighbor's young son, Liam, and begins to care very much for him.
The third perspective is from Liam as an adult. Mrs. Orchard has left Liam everything, deeding her home over to him. Liam is in the midst of a divorce, so he heads up to stay at her house. He is afraid that he is incapable of love. He remembers Mrs. Orchard only as a pleasant person he knew as a young child, but can't recall much more.
Clara sneaks into Liam's house to continue feeding the cat, but eventually they become friendly. Liam is useful in getting information that helps them get Rose back. And we eventually learn the secret that split up Liam and Mrs. Orchard so many years ago.
This book was relatively short and easily kept my interest. I was curious what was going to happen to all the characters. However, I did have some problems with this book. First, it was sometimes confusing how the timeline jumped around between characters. Second, it drove me crazy that Clara's parents did not tell Liam that their daughter had a key to his house and was determined to go feed a cat that Liam didn't even know about.
I also felt like some of the characters were underdeveloped or merely stereotypes. Liam's ex-wife seemed like an evil stereotype while his new love interest felt like a blank sheet of paper. In addition, Liam's mother acted pretty poorly with almost no explanation. Finally, I was disturbed by what happened to Rose. Finding her felt too convenient and unrealistic, but I felt like what she suffered was too brutal for the time given it by the author. If Lawson wanted to go that dark, then she should earn it with more realistic plot and character development. But that wasn't what this book was about and I felt blindsided by what felt like a stereotypical, boogieman tale of the big city.
When we finally find out what Mrs. Orchard did back in the 1940's, it also felt a little out of the blue. However, it did make for an interesting book club discussion as we tried to figure out if she was an unreliable narrator and how creepy of a character she really was.
So, on the whole, this was a quick, interesting read, but I was a little disappointed in the parts that felt unrealistic, underdeveloped, or stereotypical.
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