My Year in Books 2022: June

It's another very short list from me this time. I'm still not finding much time for reading for pleasure at the moment. Ah well... maybe that will change over the coming months.

In case you're interested, here's what I've read over the rest of the year: January, February, March, April, May

And here's the novel I read in June...

The Glass House by Eve Chase (2020)

This book was one of the four I checked out on a recent trip to my local library. It begins with the parallel stories of Rita, a nanny to a wealthy family in 1971, and Sylvie, a woman in her forties who has just split up from her husband in the present day. In Rita’s story, the young nanny travels with the Harrington family to stay in their house near a forest in the aftermath of a tragedy. Things take a turn for the strange when 12-year-old Hera Harrington finds an abandoned baby in the forest and brings it home to her mother. This is interspersed with Sylvie’s story, as she deals with both a recent accident that has landed her mother in hospital, in a coma, and her daughter Annie’s announcement that she is pregnant. These two dramatic occurrences lead Sylvie to start to look into her own background and some things that her mother has kept secret for many years. As you can imagine, it’s at this point that the two stories start to converge. Chase plays a few little tricks to keep the reader from spotting all the points of convergence, but I think it’s quite easy to start to guess the connection between the two stories. This is a book that’s heavy on atmosphere – the scenes in the house by the forest are particularly evocative – but not big on surprises. Still, although it wasn’t a complete shock, the ending ties everything together in a satisfying way.