The Girl Below

by Bianca Zander

Suki Piper is a stranger in her hometown. . . .

After ten years in New Zealand, Suki returns to London, to a city that won't let her in. However, a chance visit with Peggy — an old family friend who still lives in the building where she grew up — convinces Suki that there is a way to reconnect with the life she left behind a decade earlier. But the more involved she becomes with Peggy's dysfunctional family, including Peggy's wayward sixteen-year-old grandson, the more Suki finds herself mysteriously slipping back in time—to the night of a party her parents threw in their garden more than twenty years ago, when something happened in an old, long-unused air-raid shelter. . . .

A breathtaking whirlwind of mystery, transgression, and self-discovery, Bianca Zander's The Girl Below is a haunting tale of secrets, human frailty, and dark memory that heralds the arrival of an extraordinary new literary talent.

Genres: Fiction, Mystery, Historical Fiction, Family, Contemporary, British Literature, Adult

321 pages, Paperback

First published June 19, 2012

About the author

Bianca Zander was born in Britain but has lived for the last two decades in New Zealand. She is an established journalist who has written for national magazines and newspapers including the The New Zealand Listener, Sunday Star Times, and Dominion Post. In addition, she has produced radio shows and written for film and television. In 2009, she wrote the dramatic short film The Handover, which screened in competition at the Chicago Film Festival. She holds an MA in creative writing from Victoria University, Wellington. She lives in Auckland with her husband and son. The Girl Below is her first novel.

Reviews

[Blair · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of those irritating instances when I really wish I could give a three-and-a-half-star rating. The Girl Below is an odd book - a combination of elements which never quite form a satisfying whole - yet parts of it are hugely enjoyable, and bits of it are actually excellent. It doesn't fit into any genre classification, really: it's definitely not chick-lit, despite the chatty, amusing narrative, but it's too light to be literary fiction. It's probably a family drama more than anything else, but it's far better and more interesting than that description sounds. It has a bit of a mystery thrown into the mixture, but that's not enough to drive the plot on its own, and finally there are some elements of supernatural and fantasy. If anything is the book's downfall, it's these parts, which are included almost apologetically - the author obviously wanted to avoid the book being categorised as fantasy, but the result is that certain things just seem kind of ridiculous.

The main character/narrator is Suki, recently returned to London after ten years living in New Zealand. Rootless, unemployed, sleeping on the couch of a sort-of-friend whose flatmates hate her: she is drifting, and her wandering leads her to revisit the area she grew up in, searching for the London she used to know. There, she discovers that Peggy, an old family friend who is now gravely ill, still lives in the same building, and following an impulsive visit she slowly starts to become involved with Peggy's family - her daughter Pippa, who Suki remembers as a glamorous babysitter, and Pippa's sixteen-year-old son Caleb, whose typical teenage-boy behaviour is worrying his mother. Suki finds herself roped into giving Caleb some sort of guidance, despite feeling completely ill-equipped to do so. Scenes from the present day are intercut with memories: Suki keeps being drawn back to a party her parents held when she was a little girl, and the night her family became briefly trapped in an old air raid shelter.

The best thing about The Girl Below is the characterisation of Suki. I really came to love her and feel I knew her over the course of the story, which, between the present day and a number of flashbacks, covers most of the key points of her life. So much of this is painfully real - her isolation, boredom and dissatisfaction upon arriving in London; her estrangement from her father, and inability to fit into his new life; the messy entanglements of her past relationships, all unsuccessful; the raw pain of finding her 'best friend' from schooldays has changed beyond recognition and doesn't want to know her anymore. Looking through other reviews, readers' opinions on Suki seem to be split between those who found her unbearably selfish and those who related to her enormously, and I definitely fall into the latter category. This was a great book to read now, when I'm the same age as the character and feeling similarly unmoored in life - to be honest, it made feel better about being low-achieving and generally uncertain. I also loved how Suki and Caleb's relationship was portrayed: although the narrative skirts around some difficult topics here, it stays just the right side of uncomfortable, and their interactions are totally believable.

When the narrative started touching on Suki's mental health problems, I assumed this subject would link in with her supernatural experiences - that it would turn out she was having hallucinations, or that the dreams (or whatever they were) were connected to unresolved family issues and memories she'd repressed. That would have been a far more satisfying and interesting explanation than the idea that she was somehow stepping through a window in time back to her past, and that the human remains in the air raid shelter were there because 'a part of her had died' that day?! Also, another thing - how could the hand possibly have been Suki's when she only reached through the wardrobe that one time, but remembered having encountered it numerous times in childhood, including the 'tug of war'? And the idea of her suddenly having new memories after rescuing herself as a child... The way all of this was resolved just became silly in the end, and felt rather flimsy. It didn't ruin the book for me, but it did take the edge off what I felt could have been a great true-to-life character study.

At its best, The Girl Below reminded me of Siri Hustvedt's work and The Legacy by Kirsten Tranter. All its strongest moments are to do with character development, and I really felt it would have been better as a plotless story about life as it is: there are some wonderful observations about growing up, relationships and coming to terms with your own failings. I would recommend this book, but I'd say it's best saved for a holiday or long journey, some situation when you won't end up thinking too deeply or critically about the daft bits. I'll also be keeping an eye out for Zander's future novels.

[Ryan · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm feeling a bit like Typhoid Mary right about now. Not the historical version, more like the Marvel supervillain. My mind has fragmented into a few different reactions regarding this book, and I'm not sure what I'm actually going to be able to say about it. I need to find a way to separate the way I felt about the writing and the way I felt about the story itself. Really not sure if that's even possible, but I'm going to try.

I think I'm going to start off with the writing, or the Mary side of my conflict. For the most part, I enjoyed the way the author used language in the crafting of her story. There are not a lot of authors who are able to manipulate language in such a way that I can find myself falling in love with a book, despite myself. She created, through her words, a world that held me captivated and confused. I can't say that style got in the way of substance, I actually think the style is the only thing that saved the substance, but I'm not sure it allowed the story to really go anywhere either.

Which takes us into the Typhoid territory of my conflicted brain. I don't normally mind jumbled narratives that have a reader trying to figure out what's what and why things are happening. I actually tend to enjoy books that allow me to fill in the gaps and do some critical thinking on my own. What I don't like are jumbled narratives that uses so much misdirection and blind alleys that even the basic information needed to fill in those gaps, may not be there. I'm pretty sure I know where the author was wanting the reader to go, but I'm also pretty sure that's not where I went.

And that leaves the Bloody Mary side to explore a bit. If any of you don't already know, I'm a huge mystery fan. What that means regarding this book, who the freak knows. I'm still trying to figure out where the mystery aspect comes in. I know that while it wasn't a strict mystery, there were so many elements that were picked up, examined, and then tossed away that I'm still a bit confused by the whole thing. The many hints and clues given to explain Suki's behavior as an adult, just never panned out for me. She is floundering in her life, and supposedly the answers can be found in a troubled childhood. If that's the case, she needs to get the hell over it.

From the impression I'm left with, she refuses to grow up because her father left and her mother died from cancer. You know what, a lot of us lose one or both parents and a young age and we don't act like a 12 year old when we are almost 30. Now if what was hinted at in the book actually happened to her, then I may be able to give her the benefit of the doubt. I can't even count the many glaring hints of sexual abuse, whether at the hands of her father, two male friends that where at the party that night, a creepy neighbor, or some stranger that never showed his face; were just thrown out there. Disembodied hands that would undo dress bows being the most obvious. The problem, it never went anywhere. I can't tell you what happened in that bunker, other than a girl losing her balance and knocking out some teeth. But from what I can tell, the sexual abuse didn't happen. So what I really don't get, is why all the hints. What was the point of building it up, then never going in that direction.

To be honest with you, I don't know what happened to her as a kid, and I don't care. I don't even care if she was actually time traveling, or if it was all some sort of walking memory. I don't care about any of it. This is one case where the author's adapt use of language, which she obviously has, could not save the book. For all I care, Suki can move into that bunker and mope for the rest of her life. I don't think she will, because from what I can tell she finally got over the "trauma". I just wish I knew what the trauma was. On second thought, no I don't. I just don't care enough.

[Kirstin · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Girl Below is a brilliant book. I really loved it - tension and revelation and the painful maturing of the main character Suki sustain it all the way to the end.

The structure is so powerful that I was only dimly aware of how lovely the prose is. Yet on re-reading sections after the first heady rush I could see how cleanly and strongly written it is. I think it’s one of those books that drags you by the hair through a first desperate reading, and allows you to relax and enjoy the mysteries, structure and prose on a second.

There’s nothing saccharine about this book. It’s genuinely terrifying and powerful. So much so that even thinking about it made my skin crawl for a week afterwards.

Read it alone late at night for full impact. It survives interruptions, though you really will resent those requests to do the dishes, or tidy up, or go to work.

The statue Madeleine is a true creature of horror. Through her creation the author transported me back to my own childhood - remembering lying awake all night staring at the shape of my dressing gown hanging on the doorknob – too scared to close my eyes or look away. The horror and psychological elements in the novel are really powerful, and the author’s ability to evoke fear in those passages is stunning. The Notting Hill garden slowly took on mythical proportions; backed by all the elements in the novel of repetition, objects that began as nothing and grew and grew in power, and the frightening slime in the bunker.

The true joy of this novel is that it also reads as a wrenching personal first novel. Suki the main character is heartbreaking in her realness. She’s such a recognizable young woman: kind, lonely, selfish, ambitious, unhappy, generous, modern. I saw myself in her and I think she has universal qualities. The time-slipping horror story is rooted in the reality of a sad young woman who is trying to find a foothold in a hostile world. My heart ached for that girl.

I thought about this book for days after reading it. Highly recommended.

[Jacqui · Rating 1 out of 5]

I think Bianca Zander should have titled this book The Girl Below the Poverty Line.

Suki Piper is a boring loser with no job, no friends, no boyfriend and no prospects. And that's exactly how the story reads. A hundred pages in I was wondering if the main character was bi-polar and if the story had a point. Two hundred pages in I was skipping pages and found it made no difference to the story line. The last thirty pages didn't make sense at all.
This book was not what I was expecting. I was hoping for a mysterious, gothic-like tale of suspense but this was anything but suspenseful. The story was split in half; the past, involving Suki's scatty upbringing, dysfunctional parents and solitary childhood. A bizarre air-raid hatch in her backyard haunts her, as does a creepy life-like doll in her neighbour's home. And the present, detailing Suki's sad attempt at making and keeping friends, from her fondness for her former friends teenage son, to her impromptu trip to Greece. I still have no idea why she was asked to go. The ending was abrupt and open, leading to possible sequels but I really hope the author doesn't bother. Just plain weird.

[Anna · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was really good, in a dark, mysterious, something-strange-perhaps-supernatural-but-maybe-not kind of way, with the ultimate story being really dark and kind of depressing, actually. But nonetheless, it was a really good, compelling book, I thought. Really well-written, flowed really well, and I'm not entirely sure what actually happened, which I like ... it keeps me wondering, mulling, chewing, thinking. It was reminiscent of Audrey Niffenegger, though nowhere near Niffenegger's lyrical, poetic descriptions, but similar in tale and telling styles. And when I relate this to her, I'm speaking of "Her Fearful Symmetry" since I haven't read "The Time Traveler's Wife."

[Sarah Laing · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Girl Below by Bianca Zander

Okay, first up a confession. I’ve loved this book since its inception. Since the velvet-gloved hand first reached out of the boiler cupboard and pulled Suki’s dress ribbons undone. And mine too. I was utterly struck by this image, and the matter-of-factness with which it was presented. Magic didn’t belong in other worlds; it belonged in ours.

Bianca was in a writing workshop that I attended (convened by Curtis Sittenfeld), and our excitement was palpable when she read the first page. I was overcome by writer’s jealousy – now why hadn’t I thought to write something like that! That was brilliant. Also, I loved her tone – sharp, funny, vulnerable and hard-nosed. Suki was self-absorbed and falling to pieces, and I was drawn to her character. I willingly tailed her as she peered through keyholes at threesomes; rated boys according to the River Phoenix-ness of their noses; broke into a den of classic vinyl and mopped up the egg yolk yellow vomit of Caleb, her sixteen-year-old charge. ‘You are so in-scene’, Curtis commented at one of Bianca’s passages. And that’s her gift – she can conjure up a world that you can smell, feel, see and hear. This book is visceral, filled with human muck and bricolage. It has a sensual heft.

What I also loved about ‘The Girl Below’ was the depiction of late-seventies, early-eighties Notting Hill. I’d come to this suburb care of Hugh Grant in 1999, and his bookishness didn’t fool me. I knew it was chi-chi, somewhere that only rich people could afford. But Bianca describes a transitional Notting Hill, a place of junk shops and grocery stores, where petty thieves and chorus girls live. She casts an eccentric array of sitting tenants in her old apartment building, which is a character in itself. In particular, she describes Peggy Wright’s family.

Peggy is a wonderful character. She has a sinister statue called Madeleine that terrifies Suki as a child and an adult. She is the definition of the gin-sozzled bohemian, with her fur coats and rusting bird cages. She tyrannises her family as she slips in and out of lucidity. Her daughter, too, is fabulous – from her jerky New Wave dance moves and naughtiness as a teen, to her embracing of Suki when everything falls apart for her. She commandeers Suki into a locus-parentis role for her beautiful, wayward son Caleb.

The coming-of-age realism of this book is thoroughly compelling; what transports it is the time-slipperiness of it all. This is a Tom’s Midnight Garden for grown-ups, a Charlotte Sometimes in which Suki often finds herself displaced. Suki has to mend the wrongs of her childhood, and what better way to do it than to revisit it. To add to the spine-tingling bits, the story roars along – it’s a page-turner and a half. Bianca has spent a lot of time crafting this novel to make it the effortless, thrilling read that it is today.

[Laurel-Rain · Rating 4 out of 5]

Suki Piper has returned to London after a decade long escape to New Zealand. Specifically, she has come back to the old neighborhood in Notting Hill, where her family lived for the first eight years of her life. A place full of memories, some that feel like bits and pieces of surreal images, while others hint at mysterious goings-on that she has struggled for years to piece together and understand.

Soon Suki is once again enmeshed with members of the Wright family: Peggy, the matriarch; Pippa, the daughter who was once a teen babysitter for Suki; and Harold, the strange and sometimes condescending son. These former neighbors lived in an upstairs flat above the basement where the Pipers lived, and now Peggy lives there alone.

As Suki floats from place to place, sleeping on friends' couches, she begins to reach out to Pippa, feeling totally disconnected from everyone else, and realizing that friendships she left behind are not so easily resumed. Her old friends seem distant and disinterested.

So when Pippa asks Suki to stay with Peggy, who is in failing health, while her family goes to Greece for vacation, Suki agrees. Where else will she go?

What follows are a series of flashbacks, taking the reader from the present to the past and back again. Suki's first person narrative carries the reader into her early childhood memories, the time in New Zealand, and the strange memories that haunt her about a long-ago time before her father's abandonment of the family.

How does an old air-raid shelter in the backyard figure into Suki's half-formed and surreal memories? Who is "the girl below" and what is her significance in Suki's life? What must Suki do to finally sort out the strange moments and what they mean to her life in the present, and how do they connect to questionable things in the past?

I found myself totally absorbed in Suki's dilemmas, especially her feelings of isolation and disconnect from people and places. Her father's abandonment, followed a few years later by her mother's death, left her feeling unmoored. Rudderless, as if her life had no meaning and she had no significant connections to anyone. Her quest for a feeling of belonging through a series of love affairs and the endless pursuit of the euphoric high of drugs felt appropriate for someone who has not dealt with her issues of abandonment and loss. I was pleased at how Suki was eventually able to finally put the past into its place and form a starting point for a new future. "The Girl Below: A Novel" was a surreal journey into one somewhat narcissistic woman's psyche, and at times, was a bit self-pitying. Four stars.

[Shellie (Layers of Thought) · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars actually.

Original review posted at Layers of Thought.

A “post-adolescent coming of age” story where the “lost” main character finds herself through a series of events, some paranormal in nature.

About: Told in the first person and mixing the past with the present, the narrator Suki Piper is a young English woman who has just moved home to London from an extended stay in New Zealand. She has come back to her old neighborhood where she lived prior to her mother’s death from cancer. The problem is that Suki can’t seem to get her life together. It’s one bad situation after another. Worse is that she is having flashbacks or delusions, which are clouding her ability to make decisions.

Fumbling through her muddled life, she accidentally discovers the answers to the questions that are haunting her - questions that seem to be linked to a night in the past, where her mum, dad and family friends drunkenly explored a defunct air raid shelter after a party. It’s here that something which transcends time occurs.

Thoughts: I enjoyed this layered story with the author’s descriptive writing which is often dryly humorous. There is nothing like the British sense of humor for a good snicker, so expect some giggles. I also liked that it was a vicarious trip to London, New Zealand, Greece and slightly back in time. Set during summer it creates an enjoyable read for the warmer months. Lastly, with its light paranormal element there is an unusual twist to the story, creating it’s sweet ending. All wonderful elements for a story.

I did have several problems. One is that I did need to do some skimming to understand the plot, due to its literary nature - the author goes in depth about the characters and their experiences rather than the plot; not a bad thing for many readers. I also had a hard time relating to the damaged main character. She has an outlook that life probably could not get any worse, which is not the type of character I normally identify with. Suki was a series of car wrecks, understandably because she did have some tough events to digest.

In the end, beyond my niggles, I would say that this is a promising debut from a talented author. I give it a 3.5 star rating. Recommend for Anglophiles looking for a story with a magical twist, a positive ending, and summer settings in Europe.

[Nia · Rating 5 out of 5]

For anyone who has been displaced, in between countries, families or from their own past. This is a story that unpacks a childhood and pieces it back together with a psycho-supernatural twist. I laughed heartily and marvelled at the perfection of a word choice. Loved it, couldn't put it down.

[Jess · Rating 4 out of 5]

A beautifully written but strange story

[Allison Ketchell · Rating 5 out of 5]

THE GIRL BELOW is an extraordinary first novel suffused with a creepy surrealism that makes the pages turn themselves. The main character, Suki Piper, is twenty-eight years old when she returns to London after over a decade in New Zealand, where she sought her absent father following her mother's death. There is no magical reunion, but Suki remains there, working and sharing a flat. By the time she returns to London, her roots there have all but dried up, and she crashes, increasingly unwelcome, on an old friend's couch. A visit to her childhood flat folds her into the family of Pippa, her old babysitter, whose ailing mother, Peggy, needs care. Pippa also hopes that Suki will be a good influence on her surly teenaged son, Caleb. Suki has her own demons: surreal experiences that might be hallucinations or might be time travel. She continues to be pulled back into a horrifying time in her childhood involving a debauched party thrown by her parents and a visit to a creepy WWII bunker. She shares these hauntings/visions/time travels with Caleb and is dismayed when they follow her to Greece, where she has joined Pippa at Peggy's deathbed.

Zander shifts easily between Suki's childhood, her time in New Zealand, and the present. Suki is a fascinating character, a woman vaguely haunted by her past and unable to grasp her present. Her jobs are meaningless, her friends superficial, her boyfriends hopeless. She stays in New Zealand despite her father's rejection of her, even running errands for him and his new wife just to feel a part of something. Her hard-partying life doesn't fill the void she has felt since that mysterious incident at the age of eight, and she drifts into Pippa's family without really meaning to: Pippa pulls her in and Suki doesn't resist. Pippa's brother, Harold, offers a look at her future: "The thought of ending up like his when I was in my forties, still stewing over what my parents had or hadn't done to me as a child, was dismal, and it struck me that there had to be a cut-off point, where it all stopped being their fault and became my own" (p. 198, uncorrected proof). This is the point of crisis that Suki has reached, and it is not clear at first whether her visits to the past will stop her drifting, heal old wounds, and prevent her ending up like Harold. Zander uses, to great effect, several images from Suki's childhood to evoke dread. Every time the Wendy tent appears, or she hears the scraping of the bunker hatch, is chilling. Even the hot sun in Greece can't dispel the Gothic gloom. Eventually the threads come together to suggest a future for Suki, but be warned: if you like every little thing tied up in a neat bow in the last chapter, you may find the ending unsatisfying. Since the novel deals extensively with the unreliability of memory, I closed the book (which I could not put down and thus read in one sitting) feeling as though Suki's journey had been told in a complete and beautiful way. I highly recommend this novel.

Source disclosure: I received an uncorrected proof through LibraryThing's Early Reviewer Program.

[Kimmy · Rating 3 out of 5]

(From http://www.pingwings.ca/the-girl-below/)

Review copy provided by the publisher in conjunction with TLC Book Tours

This was a very absorbing read, one that I had a tough time putting down. The story takes place when Suki returns to London after living in New Zealand for a decade, and I immediately got the impression that Suki was struggling with all aspects of her life: friendships, relationships, job prospects, family, etc.

What really drew me in were the early chapters that flashed back to her childhood, to a night involving a party thrown by her parents and to a trip to the air raid shelter in the garden. Her tenuous grasp on these memories gave off an unsettling atmosphere, partly because, as glimpsed through Suki-as-a-child, she doesn’t quite understand all that she sees and hears, and so as a reader, I was filling in blanks and found I couldn’t explain some of the things that Suki remembered. I also found myself questioning the reliability of Suki’s memories, wondering how much faith I could put in the accuracy of these remembered events, and I liked that uncertainty.

I loved the movement between Suki’s past and present, and the way it drew out the story. Present-day Suki bounces around the couches of some old friends before settling in with an old friend’s family: Peggy was Suki’s neighbour in her parents’ old place, and Suki winds up staying with Peggy’s daughter, Pippa.

Pippa is married to Ari and has a son, Caleb. They end up asking Suki to stay and keep an eye on Caleb while taking Peggy to Greece to visit Ari’s family, and partly because she has nowhere else to go, Suki agrees. Pippa hopes that Suki can talk some sense into Caleb, as she senses that they may be similarly troubled.

Things become stranger and stranger, and the supernatural vibe to the story begins to pick up, culminating with Suki and Caleb going off to Greece with Pippa’s brother when they learn that Peggy’s health is even worse than they thought.

I loved the spooky, supernatural atmosphere that built throughout the book, and the descriptions of Greece and Ari’s family home were so vivid and wonderful. I also liked learning about Suki’s past through flashbacks, particularly the chapters that focused on her childhood and on her relationship with her parents.

There were a few things that frustrated me about Suki, like her drinking and drug use, and her strange relationship with Caleb. However, while I didn’t like these some of the things that Suki did, I think they helped to demonstrate how poorly she coped with her feelings of isolation and loneliness. She wasn’t always likeable, but I felt for her and wanted her to find happiness. It’s difficult to like a character who does unlikable things, but I didn’t see Suki as a bad person, and I think that’s a credit to the author that she has written a complex character who I couldn’t help but root for through it all.

I didn’t quite get all the answers I wanted out of this book, but maybe others will be able to read more into things than I was. Overall, I thought this was well-written and entertaining, and I recommend it. I would be interested to read more by Bianca Zander in the future.

[Jaime (Twisting the Lens) · Rating 2 out of 5]

Suki Piper is almost thirty-years-old and returns to London, her hometown for the first 18 years of her life. After living in New Zealand for the past ten years, trying to establish a relationship with her father, she returns to a town that she no longer recognizes, and seems to no longer have a place for her. She is immediately drawn to solve mysteries of her childhood after visiting an old neighbor and befriending her old babysitter. This is where it starts to get strange.
Suki has the fragmented memories of a child and does not know what all the pieces to the puzzle mean. She begins to have visions which seem very real, taking her back to a night of a party in her parents’ garden, in which she was trapped in an old air-raid shelter. Suki hopes that gathering the fragmented clues of her memory will help her to better understand everything else in her life. There is a disembodied hand that unties the bows on her dresses, teeth that are not hers, an old locket of her mother’s, and a tent that all seem to hold the answers. What those answers are, are certainly not clear- even by the end.
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For the full review, please visit: http://twistingthelens.wordpress.com

[Marianne Elliott · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved The Girl Below. A haunting debut novel in which a young woman slips back in time to solve the mysteries of her childhood, including an incident in an air raid shelter that had the hairs up on the back of my neck.

The deliciously creepy (and yet strangely familiar) mystery at the core of this beautifully crafted novel was so compelling that I abandoned everything else on my To Do list today and stayed in bed until I finished it.

Alongside the gripping psychological mystery, The Girl Below is peopled with complex, flawed, believable characters grappling with the familiar dramas of childhood, adolescence, marriage, family, divorce and death. What makes The Girl Below so powerful is the skill with which each character, and each scene, has been drawn.

For such an evocative book, I was particularly impressed by how utterly lacking in indulgence The Girl Below is. Nothing is overdone. I generally find I skim ahead in literary fiction, where sometimes it feels writers indulge their love of language or form at the cost of pace or story.

In The Girl Below I only skimmed two paragraphs in the whole book and that was only because I couldn't bear the suspense and HAD to know what was going to happen.

Highly recommended.

[Nikki Mohamed · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've owned this book for nearly two years. I had attempted to read it several times but had trouble getting into it. The first chapter is grueling. But last week, I needed something to keep my mind occupied in the waiting room at the dentist's office and this was what I hastily grabbed (again.) Once I made it through the first chapter, I was able to get into the groove of the "back and forth" between past and present. There were parts where I could feel Suki trying to overcome her past and she'd get just to the crest of the wave and then she would ebb back into self-pity, misunderstanding, and darkness. I enjoyed the creepier parts of the book and was hoping that there would be more of a tie-in between her repressed memories, that air-raid bunker, and Jimmy, but the threads weren't stitched the way I thought they'd be and I was left a little flat. I did enjoy that, like in life, the past issues with her dysfunctional family were left as is; without a "happy ever after" sort of finale. I think it was more realistic that she realized what the issues were without solving for them; just being able to recognize the realities of her childhood. That's more life-like and relatable than the usual way that novels end.

[Erin Clark · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book. It's part spooky, part self discovery, part mystery that I found very intriguing. Suki Piper is eighteen and at a complete loss when her mother dies from cancer. She decides to flee to New Zealand where her father had moved to with his new wife years ago. The family reunion does not go quite as she had imagined it would but she decides to stay and carve out a life for herself there. Ten years later she returns to London to make a fresh start. By looking up her old flat she is reintroduced to the family that lived above Suki's family in the same building. She is offered a place to stay which she desperately needs and even though she is haunted by memories of a bomb shelter and a frightening act that happened to her there as a child she agrees to move in. Suki then begins to have visions from her past about said bomb shelter and it all gets quite interesting. I don't quite know how the author did it but she really tied this story together extremely well. Definitely a page turner and highly recommended.

[Heather James · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted to like this, and the writing was strong, but I got it because it seemed to have this suspense element to it about a girl trapped below, hence the title. I thought the author did a wonderful job of planting the build up to resolve the suspense element, which even--for me--seemed to trump the fact that the non-suspense element, the main character's life, seemed to go slower at times. Then, after plowing through the whole book to figure out the suspense, I didn't get it! I won't give out spoilers, but if someone could please tell me what the heck it was all about, I'd sure like to know. It didn't make any sense. The big why??? THAT was the explanation of the ghosts and the bending of time and space? I must've missed something. When time and space bends like that, there better be a good reason for it. At least, better than this reason. I would've given this a solid four if there was a better reason for the past needing to reinvent itself.

[Trisha · Rating 1 out of 5]

What the heck was this book about??? The plotline kept jumping back and forth between the character as an adult and when she was growing up, but she also seemed to....time travel ?? to a specific event of her childhood. What was the purpose of revisiting that event? What was the purpose of the hand untying the bow? What was the purpose of....the entire story?!? Just confusing and anti-climactic. I kept waiting and waiting for things to tie together, but I was left with too many unanswered questions. A disappointing bummer :-(

[Alison · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow this was creepy, but I could hardly put it down. I don't want to say too much about the plot as there are some great twists, but as it's mentioned in the main description, there are some fantasy/sci fi elements. Not super in your face but definitely there, and I liked how they were integrated. The characters were interesting - and pretty realistic I think - and I liked how things were paced. It's pretty short and I found it to be a very fast and engaging read.

[Nadia · Rating 3 out of 5]

Picked it up for the plane ride down to Florida and was hoping for more magical realism and perhaps a lighter story line which is no fault of the author's. Good prose, well written and interesting plot. The lead character was sufficiently vague and unfocused as a person that I found myself groaning out loud every time she made another terrible choice. Was hoping for a more satisfying explanation of the ghostly visitations she had throughout the story.

[Crystal Falconer · Rating 5 out of 5]

This type of fiction is quickly becoming my favorite. The confusion of wondering what is supernatural and what is mental illness is a thrill that I hope to nourish in my literary wanderings (It started with The Lace Reader by Brunonia Barry). If anyone has any suggestions in this "type" of literature, please message me the titles!

My official review :)

http://wp.me/p2uXti-2R

[Khris Sellin · Rating 4 out of 5]

After a decade in New Zealand, Suki decides she's ready to head back to her hometown of London... but London isn't exactly welcoming her back with open arms.

A story about digging up the past, family secrets, and learning some hard truths, mixed in with some mystery and creepy, unexplainable happenings.

[Erin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was compulsively readable. I gave it four stars because it had unpredictable characters, led in directions I wasn't expecting and was more enjoyable than your average read. I felt a little let down by what was actually in the air raid cellar. strange book, worth the read.

[Mary Parker · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautifully written, compelling, spine chilling and funny. A bloody great read by an exciting author.

[Dana · Rating 2 out of 5]

I just couldn't stay interested in this. I couldn't relate to the main character. Her life and her choices are so messed up and it just got tiring.

[Lori Poole · Rating 2 out of 5]

Yawn. This one is going in the Little Library down the street...maybe someone else will like it, but too many unaddressed items for me.

[Nancy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Meh!

[Karie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have mixed feelings about “The Girl Below”. Since I can’t decide if it is a book that got close to, but didn’t quite reach a deliciously creepy and VERY twisted place or if it is a book about a train wreck of a main character…I am unable to decide how much I liked it. As a deliciously creepy book that didn’t quite finish the task, I liked it but was a bit disappointed that the bogeyman didn’t quite jump out of the closet. As a book about a train wreck of a main character…it was frustrating to have such an unreliable narrator – especially when the reader is unable to ever really discern the reality of her world.

“Up on the roof, the night was clear, with a weak moon hanging on the horizon. I wondered how another entire day had slipped away without my participating in it.”

Main character Suki Piper is so helpless to change her life, or to even recognize at times that she has a life to live, that the reader just wants to shake her. Not only is she apathetic, socially inept and relatively amoral…she is disinterested in these facts – in either recognizing them or changing them. After a while, I wondered why is she cared so little about what was occurring around her (she is never really an active participant) why I should care.

But THEN…something wonderfully disturbing would happen and I was back in. I won’t be a spoiler…but will say that when I read the section that takes place in a wardrobe late at night…I wished I wasn’t the only one awake in our house.

And sometimes the extent to which Suki is an unreliable narrator is intriguing. I found myself wondering about the enormity of the information I was not getting from her.

“Had I really talked to Edward? It seemed unlikely that he would have found me here. But if not him, then to whom had I spoken? I scanned the studio’s gray walls for clues, but found none – nothing in here reminded me of anything. Even the clothes in my suitcase did not look like mine. My driver’s license showed a picture of a familiar young woman, but the girl in the liquor store had been right not to recognize her. Neither did I.”

As a rule, I love stuff like that. I love wondering what is really behind the curtain. And I never have to be able to see it in its entirety. But I do expect some kind of payoff. At some point, the curtain needs a good yank – I want some wide eyed glimpse of claws, bloodshot eyes, a sinister laugh.

What makes for a disappointing ending is the possibility that there was never a curtain there at all…and even worse, that the story I finish seems completely different than the one I started.

[Angelica Madeline · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was so weird out by this book that is even hard to describe my thoughts about it. Just the story of a lost girl with a very troubled and afflicted life who is afraid of objects & feels that there is this dark force from her past pulling her like a magnet to discover secrets and to answer some of the many things going on inside her head and a girl who’s trying to find herself and her place in the world after a broken home.

I really would have liked to know who was the Statue Madeline and what it really represented. The situation with the dad (uh?!) I really dunno if Suki was really dead or alive... also, I thought Peggy would play a vital role to help Suki, but there was very little about her in the story.

[Rickie]

It went along alright but didn't make a lot of sense really (things you assume will make sense later on in the book didn't), but the creepy pedo stuff was a bit much (also didn't make a lot of sense if she needed a "father figure" type) & the ending was like one of those "non-endings" to me. Loose ends left hanging. Did she confront her father or forgive him? Did she take Madelaine? What about Rowan? Or her half siblings? Who was in the bunker? (yes it hints), but who did it & how would have been nice.
And it never says what exactly happened in the bunker or what did she think she felt in the closet that was alive or why they left the Wendy tent out to rot... like I said, so many lose ends. Like it ended abruptly.