Today it's my turn on the BlogTour The Girl from Widow Hills by Megan Miranda.
Megan Miranda is the author of All The Missing Girls, The Perfect Stranger, and The Last House Guest, which was the August 2019 Reese’s Book Club x Hello Sunshine pick. She grew up in New Jersey, graduated from MIT, and lives in North Carolina with her husband and two children.
Follow @MeganLMiranda on Twitter, on Instagram, or @AuthorMeganMiranda on Facebook, on Goodreads, on Amazon, Visit meganmiranda.com, Buy The Girl from Widow Hills
About the book
Everyone knows the story of the girl from Widow Hills.
When Arden Maynor was six years old, she was swept away in terrifying storm and went missing for days. Against all odds, she was found alive, clinging to a storm drain. A living miracle. Arden's mother wrote a book, and fame followed. But so did fans, creeps and stalkers. It was all too much, and as soon as she was old enough, Arden changed her name and left Widow Hills behind.
Now, a young woman living hundreds of miles away, Arden is known as Olivia. With the twentieth anniversary of her rescue looming, media interest in the girl who survived is increasing. Where is she now? The stress brings back the night terrors of Olivia's youth. Often, she finds herself out of bed in the middle of the night, sometimes outside her home, even streets away. Then one evening she jolts awake in her yard, with the corpse of a man at her feet. The girl from Widow Hills is about to become the centre of the story, once again.
It's hard being an urban legend, perhaps harder when the people around you have taken advantage of the turmoil and fear you went through as a child to profit from it. When you become so famous that heads turn when you walk in the room, people whisper when you walk by and some hungry journalist regurgitates your experience for the world to see on a fairly regular basis.
No wonder Arden is done with being the kid who disappeared and was miraculously found unharmed after a few days. Now she is Olivia, and Olivia doesn't have the same physical baggage as Arden, but unfortunately she does have the same psychological baggage.
Her shiny new undisturbed life takes a turn for the worst when she starts sleepwalking again, which is what got her into the predicament as a child. Then her sleepwalking self finds a dead man - in her yard and the evidence implies that she had something to do with his demise - she turns to a friend for help.
Miranda has this talent of combining reality with fiction when it comes to fears and scary scenarios. Why is the story so frightening at times? Perhaps because of the echoes of reality it brings with it. It's a clever ploy, because anything rooted completely in fiction will always leave the reader with a safe place to retreat to. If it is rooted in reality then the reader will often react with base responses.
The author plays the long game when it comes to this plot and lays plenty of crumbs that lead onto false yellow brick roads - only to blindside the reader with the truth at the end. Tension, doubt and fear bring this read to a fulfilling conclusion.
Buy The Girl from Widow Hills at Amazon Uk or go to Goodreads for any other retailer. Hardback · £12.99 · 2 July 2020 · Ebook also available. Publisher: Corvus. Buy at Amazon com.
