Review: The Girl From Widow Hills

Rating: 3 Stars

The Girl From Widow Hills is a spine tingling, dark thriller from Megan Miranda about a girl who survived. Twenty years ago, six year old Arden Olivia (Liv) Maynor became a household name. One night, she sleepwalked into a rainstorm, and got swept away into a storm drain. They found her after 3 days, hurt but still alive. It was hailed as a miracle, and a triumph for the community spirit of Widow Hills, and eventually the rest of the country.

Now known as Olivia Meyer, living in Central Valley, Liv thinks that she has left it all behind. She has no recollection of the her time in the sewer system. All her memories are based on news stories and the book written by her mother. As the twentieth anniversary of her rescue approaches, Liv receives news of her mother’s death, and has a sleepwalking episode again. As if this isn’t enough to make her unbalanced, she stumbles upon a dead body at her neighbor’s property. It turns out to be someone she knows from her past.

From there on, things seem to get out of control. Now, she is a person of interest in a murder case, her friends are acting strange around her, and her new life is unravelling in front of her eyes. On top of all this, she is not sure if she is innocent or not. The past she is running away from has caught up to her and she can’t do anything to stop it.

The story is unpredictable and dark. Everyone is a suspect, even Liv, because we don’t know what secrets remain hidden in her sub-conscience. There are all the classic suspects; the elderly neighbour with many firearms, the older ex-boyfriend, the quiet best friend, and the vivacious new friend. Even Liv is not sure about who to trust and who to stay away from.

The thing I liked about this book was that there was no romantic angle. There was no man waiting for Liv at the end of it all. It is the story of a girl, and it remains the story of a girl. A girl who is strong enough on her own, and there is no need for a romance on the side.

The most thought provoking point in this book is how we think of incidents as stories. Something that is terrible for one person becomes a news story for the rest of the world. People begin to think that they have a right to know about that person’s life, a right to know personal details about them. Some people even start thinking that this unfortunate person owes them something. This obsession with news “stories” is too real, and has caused grief to many families all over the wolrd, and continues to do so.

Now for what I didn’t like about this book. The story became a bit hard to swallow as it progressed. There are too many coincidences, too many secrets, quite a few things that remain unresolved, and the climax was a bit of a let down, not because of the twist; it was a good twist, one of the better ones that I have read recently, but it was just too easy in the end, for the culprit as well as the one who got them.

Even with the unbelievability, I enjoyed reading The Girl From Widow Hills. It is a good one time read for fans of dark thrillers.