Our House
By Louise Candlish
ISBN #9780451489111
Author’s Website: www(.)louisecandlish(.)com
Brought to you by OBS reviewer Omar
Summary
On a bright January morning in the London suburbs, a family moves into the house they’ve just bought in Trinity Avenue.
Nothing strange about that. Except it is your house. And you didn’t sell it.
When Fiona Lawson comes home to find strangers moving into her house, she’s sure there’s been a mistake. She and her estranged husband, Bram, have a modern co-parenting arrangement: bird’s nest custody, where each parent spends a few nights a week with their two sons at the prized family home to maintain stability for their children. But the system built to protect their family ends up putting them in terrible jeopardy. In a domino effect of crimes and misdemeanors, the nest comes tumbling down.
Now Bram has disappeared and so have Fiona’s children. As events spiral well beyond her control, Fiona will discover just how many lies her husband was weaving and how little they truly knew each other. But Bram’s not the only one with things to hide, and some secrets are best kept to oneself, safe as houses.
Review
They say that it is wrong to judge a book by its cover, but sometimes you need a good cover to catch your attention and read the summary of the book, that happened to me with Our House. The summary of the book was so intriguing that I had to know what happened to Fiona and her family.
It’s hard to talk about Our House without spoiling the story, but I will try. Everything changes for Fi when she arrives earlier than expected from her trip and finds a couple moving into her house. Her first thought is that her husband Bram, Abraham, has invited friends of his to stay for some time without telling her, but she notices that the moving crew are pulling furniture that is too big for a small stay. Once entering the house Fi finds that all of her things and her family is gone, the rooms are clean, and the new furniture is being arranged.
Fi learns that the new couple, The Vaughan’s, bought the house and are moving in. At first Fi doesn’t believe them and remembers a news about information scam and homeowner’s fraud, she believes that is the case with her house and family, but the question is, where is Bram and the kids?
For the last year, her marriage with Bram had started to end, they were in the process of getting a divorce, but decided to stay living in the same house for their kids. Their counselor suggested the bird nest approach, for half of the week one of them couldn’t live in the house while the other was there. Everything had been going well the kids had started to get use to the new system and both her and Bram were getting along better.
But after arriving from her trip, everything shattered. It seems that Bram had secrets that she didn’t knew about and some of her decisions were not the bests.
I liked this book, it was an interest topic to expand into a story. I liked the idea of coming home to find everything that is yours and your family gone, and new people are starting to move in. Author Louise Candlish made a great job plotting the mystery for the reader, letting the reader follow the clues until the end to make it more interesting to keep reading.
The story moves from past to present as both Fi and Bram tell their side of the story leading to the first pages of the book. The timeline can get a little fussy at sometimes, but it still easy to follow. We learn that most of the mystery centers around Bram and a problem he got into that scaled too fast. Still, after reading the story I don’t think all the fault falls on Bram, Fi played a big part in the after match of their fight by in her life. A lot of their problems could have been solved if they had talked to each other without judging, a real talk and listening to each other’s problems.
The only thing that I didn’t like or bothered me was the aftermath of all characters learning why things happened. The ending was not what I expected, it felt anticlimactic and not at par with the rest of the story. The way the story ends gives me the idea that the author might continue the story, but I’m not sure how the storyline will continue.
At the end I liked the story of Our House.
If you like a good mystery story, then I recommend you Our House by Louise Candlish. This story centers around a family that hasn’t been complete for a couple of months, and when the mom, Fiona, arrives home to see strange people moving into her house, it’s the best time to reevaluate everything in her life and the secrets her family has.
*OBS would like to thank the publisher for supplying a free copy of this title in exchange for an honest review*
