Today I’m joining the blog tour for Dear Future Me. My review is written with thanks to Tracy Fenton for inviting me on the tour and to the publisher for my copy of the book via Netgalley.

Blurb:

Twenty years ago, a group of students each wrote themselves a letter – Dear Future Me – confiding their deepest dreams and their very darkest secrets.

Now the letters, thought long discarded, have begun to drop through letterboxes. For some they will make them re-evaluate the decisions they’ve made, the person they could have been.

For others, the letters could be deadly . . .

A compulsively gripping thriller of regret, hidden secrets and the deepest betrayal, Dear Future Me is the unmissable new book from the lauded author of The Dangerous Kind and The Captive.

Review:

I chose to take part in this blog tour as I found the premise of Dear Future Me really intriguing. I thought about what I might have written as a teenager in a letter to my future self, and I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t want to read it now, in my thirties. I wasn’t surprised that reading the letters stirred a lot of difficult memories, but the secrets and lies made the novel really interesting and I was compelled to see what had happened, both in the past and the present.

Dear Future Me is set in Saltburn and I loved Deborah O’Connor’s detailed descriptions of the location. I have family members who live in the area so I’m slightly familiar with it and the writing took me right to the action. Saltburn is the perfect setting for this novel, as the strong community feel of the town means that many of the characters have stayed in the area into adulthood or returned after being away for work or university. In many cases, they are still on contact with their former classmates and this creates extra jeopardy as the secrets start to unravel.

Through the letters, Deborah O’Connor gives the reader valuable insight into the characters she has developed so well and I loved getting to know them. The characters are not always likeable, but they each had their own demons that shaped the way they behaved, so I did feel sympathy for some of them, even if they had acted badly.

The ending of the novel is full of tension and a sense of danger and I was holding my breath as everything unravelled.

I’ve loved the author’s previous work and Dear Future Me was no different. I’m excited to see what she does next!

Dear Future Me is available from Amazon.

You can follow the rest of the blog tour here: