The Flower Girls by Alice Clark-Platts – Spoiler Free Review

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Title: The Flower Girls
Author: Alice Clark-Platts
Genre: Adult Thriller
Publication Date: January 24th, 2019
Pages: 329 (Paperback)
Publishers: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc (Raven Books)
Rating:

Goodreads Synopsis

YOU’LL NEVER FORGET THE FLOWER GIRLS

The Flower Girls. Laurel and Primrose.

One convicted of murder, the other given a new identity.

Now, nineteen years later, another child has gone missing.

And The Flower Girls are about to hit the headlines all over again…

I’m not formatting this review the same way I usually do purely because I don’t have enough to talk about in all the sections I generally use. So instead I’ll talk about the negatives and the positives.

But first I just want to touch on thoughts that aren’t necessarily positives or negatives. This is the first time I have read an adult Thriller and I really don’t know how to feel about how the book ends. I think this is purely because I generally read YA and I am so used to the typical, everything is resolved in the end, type books. Which this is NOT! Most things were revealed to the reader but then you are thrown a spanner at the end that makes you sit there thinking ‘NO, what, help!’. There is also two major things that are mentioned once at the end and it’s not explained and I want to know why & how!! To some degree I get it and understand that leaving it how the author did makes it thrilling and makes you think. I’m not okay with not really knowing how things would end though!

Negatives

So I have 2 main things that annoyed me with this book.

First off, the POV, this book is told in third person POV which I always struggle with a bit. It was the same in this book, I couldn’t really connect with the characters. So while I wanted to know what happened because I was curious as hell, I didn’t care who it specifically was because I didn’t have a connection with any of the characters that made me root for one or the other. The POV just meant I was a bit disconnected from the book and it’s characters.

Next is the jumps in the time line of events. Honestly the book was all over the place when it came to the time line of events. Each chapter would swap between who we were following, where the person was & the time line. Things were barely ever revealed simply in order. I appreciated the glimpses into the past sprinkled throughout the book. They were distinguished by a simple ‘1997’ or ‘1998’ at the start of the chapter however they were also no in order and while the ‘1997’ or ‘1998’ made it easy to know that we were in the past but not when specifically in the time line of events.
All this jumping around simply made the book hard to follow. Most chapters were only a couple chapters and some of the time it took most of the chapter figuring out when & where we were currently looking at.

Positives

This book took a bit of getting used to with the POV & time jumps which took about 100/150 pages but once I got into it I was hooked! I read the last 200ish pages in one day easily!

The chapters are super short which means you feel like you are getting through the book quickly, which I was but it just added to it. Some of the chapters also ended on cliff hangers of sorts and then the next chapter would be completely unrelated to whatever just went down. So you are gripped and speed through the next couple chapters till you find out what just happened after that cliff hanger. This book is very hard to put down in that way. I was literally walking about the house reading it while doing other things because I just wanted to know what happens.

Every character in this book is very fleshed out and interesting. They all have very different views & backgrounds. It was really interesting learning about these characters and figuring out what happened to make them who they are. Granted they aren’t all revealed, but that is just part of the mystery.

Lastly this book is COMPLETELY UNPREDICTABLE!! You think you have a grasp on what went down but then a spanner, no scratch that, the whole fucking toolbox is thrown into the works and your ideas are completely out the door.

Well that is all my thoughts thrown on a post. Thanks for reading!

Thank you to NetGalley & Bloomsbury Publishing Plc (UK & ANZ) for providing me an eARC of this book in exchange for an honest review!

You can purchase a copy for yourself at any of the links below.

You could also use my affiliate links for Book Depository, Booktopia or Angus & Robertson.

Bloomsbury Aus
Paperback & Hardback

Book Depository
Paperback // Hardcover

Booktopia
Paperback

Amazon
eBook // Paperback // Hardcover // Audiobook

Have you read The Flower Girls?
What did you think of it?
Do you agree that the jumping around was hard to follow?
Also, is leaving you with 1000 questions normal for Thrillers?!

Purchase any of the books mentioned from BOOK DEPOSITORY! World Wide FREE shipping and awesome prices? Can’t say no to that!

Aussie? Want quick shipping? Awesome prices? Want to be able to utilise AfterPay? Then try BOOKTOPIA or even ANGUS & ROBERTSON!

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