Book Review: "The Other Side of the Wall" by Andrea Mara

Andrea Mara had a huge hit with 'No One Saw a Thing' and then a huge miss with 'Someone in the Attic'. I'm giving her books another chance by reading 'The Other Side of the Wall' and honestly, it's definitely a lot more enjoyable than I was antipcipating. As I write this introduction, I am perhaps a quarter of a way through the book. At the moment, I have a lot of backstory, the novel is packed full of lengthy and atmospheric descriptions and so, you can only guess that I am definitely of the belief that this is going to be a great book. Let's see what happened then...

Sylvia hasn't been getting much sleep as her new baby is only small. One night, she's up and about, bleary eyed and tired when she spots a child face down in the pond next door. It's not moving. Trying but failing to wake her partner, Tom, she leaves her baby with him and goes out to the neighbour's yard. Sneaking in, she sees nothing out of the ordinary and the child has disappeared. She awoken the next morning to the report of a missing child in the area over the radio. Over the next few chapters, strange things will happen. Things such as a photograph with her baby's face crossed out, her daughter claiming there's a monster in her room at night - but when she gets the child, there's water in the bedroom her daughter didn't have before. Sylvia is creeped out.

The new neighbours seem nice enough. Whilst Kate and the kids are out at Galway, Sam stays behind to do up the place after the last owner passed away. When Sylvia introduces herself to Sam whilst walking her dog, she can't see anything out of the ordinary with him at all. In fact, he seems like a perfectly cheerful man. A lot more cheerful and helpful than her own partner, that is. It's around this time Sylvia has thoughts that Tom might be having an affair, being bogged down with work and babysitters not turning up doesn't help that either. But when we get a glimpse into the relationship of Sam and Kate - it doesn't look any more ideal than Sylvia's own. The author definitely is setting us out to find tensions and feel the strain that ignorance can put on a relationship. Tom is completely ignorant of Sylvia and there are points where Kate is ignorant of Sam. This raises very severe concerns in the reader and it is excellently done.

Interspersed into the story are chapters entirely written in italics with no name assigned to their third person perspective. But there's a whispered conversations, forty-thousand pounds, and a loaded gun. There's violence and terror. There's murder and blood. I don't want to say too much about this part because it's very important that it is read alongside the atmospheric parts of the story and understood as something that is not apart. It is also important that I don't tell you exactly what the plot of that part is - it's very, very tense.

Besides this, there are chapters which investigate the past. We get thrown back into the previous decades and look at things like Kate's brother standing at the top of a slide when he is only a little kid - too scared to go down. But as much as you think these chapters are irrelevant, they are definitely not. What the author has created is a jigsaw puzzle where you must recall tiny details or you'll never actually understand why the ending happened the way it did.

The main question is not just about the kid in the pond but it is also about how people aren't quite who they seem to be. Our opinions of people like Kate and others shift over the course of the book and the author does a very good job of confusing us about personalities and giving us limited context on situations of dire concern. The only thing I would say that would need to be improved about this is the sheer amount of characters there are. Often, I felt like there were a lot of character I just didn't know very well and they were coming and going from the story when it seemed convenient for them to be there and do things. Apart from that though, the book was brilliant.

All in all, a tense, atmospheric very slow-burn is definitely the way to keep me interested. Even small, seemingly normal scenes feel intense and eerie. For example: when Rosemary offers Kate a cup of tea and Kate declines, which kind of puts Rosemary on edge a bit, you can tell there's something there from what you've learnt about Kate's character so far, but you could never guess what it is.