sawauthor reviewed The Block Party by Jamie Day
A Banal "Thriller"
1 star
Welcome to Alton Road, an exclusive upper-class cul-de-sac filled with intrigue, secrets, and a troubled cast of characters. Pegged as a thriller, the story takes on the dual perspectives of Alex, a middle-aged legal meditator, wife, and mother struggling with a growing drinking problem, and Lettie, her teenage daughter struggling to find her footing through her final year of high school.
On reading The Block Party, I had a moment during which I suspected that the author was pulling a clever trick on the reader. Bouncing between third-person perspective chapters focused on Alex and first-person perspective chapters from Lettie's point of view, the entire book reads as though it's written by a teenage girl. I figured that the older Alex's chapters seemed so either to convey her world through the eyes of her daughter or to illustrate that the mother's mentality is as immature as her daughter's mindset.
But as …
Welcome to Alton Road, an exclusive upper-class cul-de-sac filled with intrigue, secrets, and a troubled cast of characters. Pegged as a thriller, the story takes on the dual perspectives of Alex, a middle-aged legal meditator, wife, and mother struggling with a growing drinking problem, and Lettie, her teenage daughter struggling to find her footing through her final year of high school.
On reading The Block Party, I had a moment during which I suspected that the author was pulling a clever trick on the reader. Bouncing between third-person perspective chapters focused on Alex and first-person perspective chapters from Lettie's point of view, the entire book reads as though it's written by a teenage girl. I figured that the older Alex's chapters seemed so either to convey her world through the eyes of her daughter or to illustrate that the mother's mentality is as immature as her daughter's mindset.
But as the plot trod on and various secrets revealed, the pacing went a little wonky and I realized that cleverness was not the name of the game here. And once I realized that the story fell apart for me. What's left is a banal tale of wrongdoings, paranoia, and secrets in suburbia with a payoff that's undermined by the placement of the end at the beginning of the book.