Today I’m delighted to be taking part in the blog tour for Arrietty. My review is written with thanks to Anne Cater for inviting me on the tour and to the publisher for my copy of the book.

Blurb:

Terrified…
Arrietty wakes one morning to find her mother gone. Turning to her father for reassurance, she gets the terrifying sense that he – and others – are hiding a crime too dreadful to name.

Trapped…
Confined to the house on the cliff, Arrietty worries for the safety of her brother as her father becomes increasingly unstable and unpredictable.

Truth…
Arrietty’s hunt for answers plunges her into a nightmarish fight for survival that leads her to the most awful secret of all.

Review:

Arrietty is a novel that caught my attention on social media a while ago and I’m so glad I’ve had the opportunity to read it. It was worth every second of the wait! Abby Davies is an author with whom I wasn’t previously familiar, but I shall definitely change that now. She is a tremendously talented writer and l loved how she created an atmosphere so incredibly claustrophobic and tense that I was ready to jump into the Kindle and help Arrietty myself. I was desperate to know what had happened and it was very difficult to stop reading after “one more chapter.”

The first part of Arrietty is told over two different time lines: the present day and two years ago. This gave me some insight into Arrietty’s family life and made me even more intrigued for what was coming next. For the most part, the narrator is Arrietty and I loved the uncertainty the author created around whether she is reliable and which characters could be trusted. I was suspicious of everyone and changed my mind with every chapter!

Abby Davies tackles some really tough but important themes in Arrietty, although to explain them would almost certainly give away spoilers. Many of the themes have been approached in novels before – they’re not new and almost every reader will be able to relate to them on some level, but the way she tackles them is unlike anything I have ever read before and I am in awe of the amount of research she must have done and the absolute sensitivity with which she writes about the most heartbreaking subjects. The plot is put together brilliantly and I was fascinated the whole way through. There are some particularly hard hitting moments that I won’t discuss in this review, but I really want the author to know I appreciated them!

Arrietty is available from Amazon.

You can follow the rest of the blog tour here: