I am fascinated by the psychology of book spines - that tiny bit of surface area facing the potential reader in a bookshop, which has to harness all the tools at its disposal - colour, font, texture - alongside the title and the author’s name, to call out to the customer and let them know this is the book for them. It’s like a language that readers learn without knowing it. For example subconsciously I know to avoid books with silvery lettering or certain fonts. I don’t know why, I just do. And this book nearly had me fooled. I only picked it up out of desperation, since there are so few sources of reading matter during the lockdown. I had it pegged as something safe and sugary, a few degrees north of Mills and Boon. Purely down to the font and the colour of the lettering on the spine. It wasn’t like that at all.

This is a book that covers bullying in a way I haven’t encountered in literature before. It’s written from the point of view of one of the bullies, and it isn’t about a syrupy seeing of the light. It deals with the way that we seek safety through membership of groups where we align ourselves against those not deemed good enough to be members. And how easy it is to find yourself out in the cold and what that feels like. And deciding that maybe it is better to stay there. I loved every minute of this beautifully written and thought provoking book. ( )

Heart-wrenching book about the effects of bullying and how family sins can be revisited on new generations. I didn't like the ending but the rest of it was enthralling. ( )

I was a bit unsure about starting this book, because I wasn't sure if it would really be my kind of thing. However, after only the first page, I was completely captivated.

It was so refreshing and different to read from the point of view of a character who is terribly flawed, yet still be able to empathize with her. Laura is living in a world of French classes for toddlers and play-dates only with the ''right kind'' of children.

She thinks she has left her past behind her, until the mother of a girl she bullied horribly phones her and asks her to help get her daughter- Heddy- out of a psychiatric hospital. Laura knows she contributed to Heddy's breakdown, yet only agrees to help in order to get Heddy out of her life for good. The story that follows was completely compelling and I loved every second of it. Laura really grows as a character, and I found the stories of her past very intriguing- even if they were a little disturbing.

I loved every minute of this book and would recommend it to anybody. ( )

Laura Hamley inhabits a world of suburban bliss, with her perfect husband, her perfect children, and the perfect social storm of friends and hangers-on whirling around her. Heddy Partridge was the stereotypical fat social pariah of the playground, but now she is a patient in a psychiatric hospital. Heddy’s mother, desperate to help her daughter, reaches out to Laura, who rapidly finds herself entangled in the famiy’s problems. This perfect world of hers has little room for guilt, for introspection, or indeed for anyone unfortunate enough not to fit in.

The premise is good; Laura finds herself increasingly questioning her own lifestyle, as her encounters with the adult Heddy and her family show her that not everyone can build themselves the perfect world in which to live. Her friends seem shallow, their cares insignificant, and the values to which she has always subscribed suddenly hollow. Bugler has come quite close to writing an excellent book, but the whole piece feels inconsistent. I have a lot of questions which remain unanswered; why were Heddy’s mother’s attempts to contact Laura suddenly so impossible to ignore, when Laura herself had been happy to forget her own cruelty towards Heddy for so long? What did Laura’s parents hope to achieve by forcing the girls to be friends, and why is the twist at the end of the novel so trite?

An engaging read, but I found the ending rather weak and that cast a shadow over the rest of the book for me. It is something more than chick lit, but only marginally so. The plot is more holey than St Peter’s fishing net. ( )

This is a very dark story of childhood cruelty and the dawning realisation of the emptiness of the 'perfect life'. The narrator, Laura, has everything. Perfect children, lawyer husband, glamorous mummy friends, and a cocoon on the so-called desirable life of an upper middle class Middlesex village. But Laura had spent her childhood tormenting Heddy Partridge, who wasn't thin, wasn't blonde, wasn't clever, but just wanted to join in.

I wanted to dislike Laura, and in fact, oftentimes i did, especially as she relates some of the horrific and cruel things she did to Heddy when she was a child. But the author has Laura come to a dawning realisation that the life she is living is shallow, critical and altogether false, and as she develops, so does your empathy. As an adult, Heddy is suddenly back in her life, although in tragic circumstances. She's had a terrible breakdown and is in a psychiatric hospital. It is from here that Laura starts to find her own humanity again.

The ending of this novel is particularly dark - at the end, no-one is really absolved of their guilt, responsibility for what they did in the past, and current choices. Their only choice is to face it, and live with it. ( )