Some of the boggy ponds were so deep that if a girl stepped into one it would swallow her forever… 2004: Rosalie is walking through the wild wetland behind her mother’s home on the isolated Isle of Man when she stumbles across a body. Having strayed from the path and lost her brother, Dallin, it’s hours before she’s discovered, shaken and exhausted. With a reputation for telling stories, not … telling stories, not many believe the little girl’s tale of the body in the marsh.
2019: Dallin, estranged from his family, returns unannounced with a woman named Cora by his side. Cora’s sister went missing fifteen years ago and she believes Rosalie was the one who found her. As dangerous secrets are unearthed, Cora and Rosalie start asking questions about a girl who some would rather keep buried…
An atmospheric crime novel, perfect for fans of Cara Hunter and Erin Kinsley.
What readers are saying about Little Girls Tell Tales:
“A cracking story that had me totally engrossed. It’s original, intriguing and well written, with a great cast of characters.”J.P. Carter, author of At Your Door
“This was quite the page turner. Only took me a few hours to finish… Can’t wait to read more from Rachel. She’s a wonderful author.”
“Great book, haven’t wanted to put it down! Definitely stayed up way too late reading this enthralling read.”
“A wonderfully atmospheric read.”
“Great crime novel with lots of twists and turns! Honestly did not predict what would happen next, which is rare since I read so many mysteries.”
“I read it in one day! I’d recommend Little Girls Tell Tales to those who like slow-burning suspense novels rather than the high-octane, big-twist version”
“This book is a slow burn full of subtle twists and social commentary… Bennett’s prose is beautiful and descriptive, and the characters are realistic and likeable… anyone looking for complex family drama, well-thought out mystery, this is the book for you. A beautiful read with a satisfying conclusion.”
more
I don’t do synopsis/recap reviews, as I figure you can read the blurb. I’d rate this book 2.5 Stars, rounded up to 3.
The good stuff: Fine character writing, along with nice descriptive passages about the island kept my attention, along with the family relationships and tensions.
The not as good: I thought at 400 pages it was too long, and the same story could have been 150-175 pages shorter. And I grew numb reading about the MC’s grieving process. Too slow for a “slow burn.”
But the good did outweigh the bad, so all is ok.
I received an e Advanced Reader Copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. Thank you to the author, publisher and Net Galley for this opportunity to read and review the book. #LittleGirlsTellTales #NetGalley
Fifteen years ago Rosalie stumbled over a body. Having lost track of her brother, Dallin, it’s hours before she is found. Rosalie has a history of telling stories, so on one believes her story of the body in the pond.
Her brother has been estranged from the family so it’s a surprise when he shows up out of nowhere and in the company of a woman named Cora. Cora’s sister went missing fifteen years ago and she thinks Rosalie was telling the truth .. and the body was that of her sister.
As dangerous secrets are unearthed, Cora and Rosalie start asking questions about a girl who some would rather keep buried…
Well-written with a steady pace throughout. The characters are deftly drawn amid the swirling mystery of the Isle of Man. There were some twists and turns that kept the suspense in high gear, leading to an unexpected conclusion.
Many thanks to the author / Harper Collins UK / One More Chapter / Netgalley for the digital copy of this crime fiction. Read and reviewed voluntarily, opinions expressed here are unbiased and entirely my own.
Kept me intrigued.
Took quite awhile to get into this book and what the point was of young girl finding bones in the bogs. Half way through, actually 3/4 way through, it starts to come together. Would have given more starts but was SOOO slow. Also, author is very repetitive of current situation of the woman as a young girl who found the bones.
Published May 2020.
This is a book I downloaded from NetGalley.
As a young girl, Rosalie was wandering through the curraghs and stumbled upon some bones … what she thought was a body. Because she had been away from home too long, her mom panicked and had a lot of folks out looking for her. When Rosalie was found, no one believed her story … but no one apparently forgot either. In her early twenties, after not seeing her brother (Dillon) for five or six years, he returned home with a new friend, Cora … someone he met through an online forum … the same forum where he published Rosalie’s story (unbeknownst to her). Cora was looking for her missing sister, Sabine, long since missing with no clues as to her whereabouts. Did Rosalie find Sabine all those many years ago? Some odd things occurred while Cora and Dillon were camping near the curraghs. Was someone trying to cover something up and scare them off from their search?
While Ms. Bennett’s writing style is different for me, she weaves an interesting tale with some underlying family conflict, Rosalie learning to be okay without her wife (Beth), and perhaps a hint of romance between Rosalie and Cora.
Each of the main characters carries a burden from the past. How they work together and deal with past and present makes for an interesting read.
Just not one of my favorites by a long shot. Very mixed up and way to carried on.
This one took me a bit to get into. There was a lot of descriptive passages at the beginning that made it hard to delve right in and get hooked onto the story. Even the description of Rosalie finding the skeleton didn’t stand out too much and I thought it would have held a greater impact. That happens at the very beginning before the main story takes place in the present day, 15 years later.
We find that Rosalie is still grieving the death of her wife Beth, who was the childhood best friend of her brother, Dallin. He moved away and left Rosalie and her mother alone during hard times, so Rosalie is shocked when he just turns up one day with a woman named Cora, who believes the lost body in the marsh could be her sister, Simone, who disappeared 20 years ago. As no one really believed her story, Rosalie is surprised and thankful that someone feels she was telling the truth. She lives in her childhood home, right by the curraghs where the body was found and still thinks about it from time to time.
Rosalie helps Cora as much as she can, giving her all the details she remembers, visiting neighbors who lived in the area back then, and searching through the curraghs. Her relationship with Dallin is strained and even though he accompanied Cora on the journey, he gives Rosalie reason to doubt why Cora is only now searching for a sister that disappeared 20 years ago. And are a series of mishaps that occur just bad luck or does someone want to keep these three off of the case?
It’s an enjoyable story that I feel could do with a bit more action and less introspection. There are many loose ends that aren’t tied up at the conclusion, which I don’t quite understand. Is it to leave way for a sequel or could the author not figure out how to bring closure so she just left it up for interpretation? Had there been greater resolution, I would have been better satisfied and inclined to read more of this author’s work.
Fifteen years ago, Rosalie was just ten years old when she got lost in the curraghs, a stretch of marshland close to her mother’s cottage in a remote part of the Isle of Man. And when Rosalie came stumbling out of the bogs, cold, frightened and babbling about finding a skeleton, nobody really took her seriously because little girls, after all, do tell tales.
Fast forward to today and Rosalie is living in her mother’s cottage as she tries somehow to recoup after the devastating loss of her wife Beth to cancer. She doesn’t want or need her ne’er do well brother Dallin turning up on her doorstep with a stranger in tow, but when she hears Cora’s story, she can’t turn her away. Because Cora believes Rosalie really did find human remains in the curraghs that day… and she thinks they might have been her sister Simone’s.
Simone was only fifteen when she became a teenage runaway. Slowly, throughout the book, via snippets of Cora’s point of view, we find out that Simone had in fact been having an affair with an older (married) man, and it becomes obvious that Cora feels immense guilt for Simone’s disappearance even though she was only nine at the time. And as Cora, Rosalie and Dallin search, it also becomes obvious that someone doesn’t want them in the curraghs, doesn’t want their secrets to be unearthed.
It’s an interesting choice to tell this story primarily from Rosalie’s point of view – the impartial witness, in a way – rather than Cora’s, the family member of the victim. Rosalie’s state of mind plays a big part because she’s deep in grief, but she’s a very compassionate person and she never, ever doubted that she really did find a body that day. Even in the depths of her own trauma, she wants to help Cora get closure.
The writing is beautifully descriptive, but the plot’s a little slow for the first two-thirds of the book. It doesn’t really pick up the pace until close to the end, when the three searchers realise Simone’s killer has been watching all along, misdirecting the investigation and determined to ensure her body is never found. Suddenly it’s suspenseful and there’s real danger; I couldn’t stop reading until I got to the end once things really kicked off. Stick with it after the slow start and you’ll be well rewarded. Five stars for a beautifully written story which had me riveted by the climactic action.
Disclaimer: I received a review copy of this title via NetGalley.
In 2004, young Rosalie becomes separated from her brother, Dallin, and friend, Beth, while walking through the wetland on the isolated Isle of Man. Having strayed from the path, it’s hours before she’s discovered shaken and exhausted, and reporting she found a dead body. Rosalie is known for telling tales, so when the police are unable to locate the body most believe it’s just another tall tale.
Fast forward to 2019. Over a year since Rosalie’s wife, Beth, died, Rosalie is still struggling mightily with grief. She’s shocked to find Dallin, who has long been estranged from their family, on her doorstep unannounced with a woman named Cora. Cora’s sister went missing many years ago and she believes Rosalie found her in the wetland all those years ago. Rosalie becomes wrapped up in Cora’s plan to find the body and confirm it’s Cora’s sister. When disturbing things begin happening to Cora it seems someone doesn’t want them to keep searching.
Rosalie is a fantastic character. The setting is intriguing and a character itself. I don’t know if this book is intended to be the first in a series or a stand alone, but I look forward to reading whatever the author publishes next. Recommended for fans of character-driven mysteries. 4.5 Stars
Content Warnings: SPOILERS statutory rape (not on page); homophobia; child abuse END SPOILERS
Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for the ARC. The opinions in this review are honest and my own.
Overall, this is a good novel. The premise intrigued me, as I’m sure it does many readers. While I think certain aspects of the premise’s execution fully developed, it still had merit.
Suspense
The book opens with young Rosalie becoming lost in the curraghs (boggy wetlands). She falls behind her brother Dallin and his friend Beth, and finds herself alone. Then she finds the skeleton.
The opening is beautifully written: the descriptions of the curraghs are appropriately eerie; there’s good tension between the siblings, partially due to their divorced parents forcing them to live apart; and the sense that the marshy land might swallow young Rosalie as she becomes increasingly disoriented. Rosalie is sympathetic here. When she finds the skeletal remains, she feels sad. But when a search team finds her hours later, no one believes her story about the human remains. The police search and find nothing. She and Beth search and find nothing.
When the story transitioned to the present day, the plot became bumpy. Rosalie was mourning the loss of Beth, who had been her wife, and has withdrawn from the world. But we didn’t know all that for quite a while, as the story focused on her need for routine and structure to keep going from some unknown past event. She had withdrawn from the world.
All of this makes sense. I got the sense that Rosalie was a woman struggling to keep her head above the waves of grief overwhelmed her. But it was slower paced in this section than many suspense novels are.
In fact, all the sections that focus on Rosalie emerging from her protective cocoon of routine are slow. It was beautiful writing. But there was a certain lack of tension that made these sections feel extraneous, as if they weren’t fully interwoven in the fabric of the story. They seemed to focus on character development at the expense of the plot. Or maybe the character arc at the expense of the story arc, if that makes sense.
By 40% of the way through the book, I still wasn’t feeling much suspense, and other than some odd threatening letters, I didn’t feel like the characters were in danger. Even the increasingly violent threats against their search didn’t grip me very much.
It wasn’t until about three-quarters of the way through the book that things clicked into place for me. Then it truly felt like a suspense novel. After that, the story raced, steamrolling everything in its path until I turned the last page for a satisfying, if abrupt, ending.
Characterization
I found Rosalie immensely likable. As the years between the skeleton’s discovery and the present, she had developed a habit of “talking” to the skeleton’s ghost. She named her Bogbean, after the flowers that she’d seen around the gravesite. There’s something rather sweet about this. Rosalie was a socially awkward, seemingly shy woman with few friends, and it was understandable that she might feel a bond with the dead Bogbean that no one besides her had seen and no one besides Beth believed that she had seen.
She tended to believe the best of people, but she didn’t comes across as naive, gullible, or stupid, in my opinion.
Cora was instantly likable, too. She was prepared to search the curraghs and determined to search every square inch of them. (She has measured it out on the map!) While she was obsessed over finding her sister Simone, she also longed for normality. She and Rosalie both needed closure.
Dallin, as Rosalie’s older brother, was a complicated and not always (or often) likable guy. He left town under a cloud, hasn’t spoken to their sick mother in years, and lies about, well, almost everything. Half the time I wanted to shake him and the other half of the time I wanted to smack him, and his sister apparently shared my feelings! He did get a small moment of redemption toward the end, though.
Narrative Style
One odd thing popped up in the narration. Bennett wrote most of the book from Rosalie’s 1st person point of view. But at random moments, short passages appeared in an unnamed person’s point of view. We read someone addressing the missing Simone as “you” and referring to an unknown man as HIM. It was easy to guess that these were from Cora’s point of view. But as she addressed “you” (Simone), the narration felt stylistically different from the rest of the book. It was also written in that deliberately ambiguous manner that is often used in current suspense novels.
I don’t think these passages served the story well. Sure, I got to know Simone a bit. But other than that, they came off as superfluous to the main story. Cora covered most of the information when she talked to Rosalie, and reading about “HIM” didn’t pique my interest.
Also, the use of “you” was off-putting to me. I’ve had some bad experiences with the 2nd person POV–don’t ask–and while this wasn’t technically 2nd POV, it flirted with it. This might just be my personal biases at work, and other people might find these passages suspenseful and intriguing.
Kudos to Rachel Bennett for experimenting with a different method of narrative storytelling, though. It’s always better to take the risk of trying something different in writing than to stick with the tried-and-true; even if it doesn’t quite work, you’ve still tried. The rest of the storytelling was well executed. Rosalie’s point of view felt natural and unforced.
Setting
All of this may sound as if I disliked the book. Au contraire. I did enjoy it. I read it in one day! It felt more like a mainstream novel with a strong suspense element, though, than a suspense novel.
I particularly liked the way Bennett uses the setting to develop the story.
This book could not take place anywhere other than the curraghs. Like the skeleton half submerged in the boggy land, every character struggles to stay on solid ground. Life threatens to suck them under, swallow them whole. Alone, they are like little girl Rosalie: wandering, searching for footholds, and fighting off panic.
Each of the major characters struggled to reach out to others. Dallin hid behind lies. Cora took shelter behind her maps and obsession Rosalie took refuge in her rigid schedules and isolation. Yet only working together could they be strong enough to make it through to the other side of the curraghs.
Recommended
This is a solid effort from Rachel Bennett. I’d recommend Little Girls Tell Tales to those who like slow-burning suspense novels rather than the high-octane, big-twist version.
Trigger warnings: bereavement, homophobia, missing persons, child abuse, murder.
Thanks to Netgalley, One More Chapter Books, and Harper Collins for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.