🌹Book Review ⭐️⭐️.7931 🌹
🌹When #rumorgate exploded on bookstagram with @scaredstraightreads and @beautyandthebooks at the crux of this mayhem...I KNEW I needed to join in on this madness and find out if I landed on Team Dennis (hated it) or Team Jamie (loved it). Well here’s the deal- you know when you’re reading a book and you keep thinking “This is all eerily familiar. I definitely read this before.” Well that’s what I felt the ENTIRE time I read The Rumor. This was 5 mediocre housewife thrillers rolled into one and then watered and dumbed down aggressively. I could barely keep track of the characters because they were all the same damn humans! Oh look there’s Jessica, Jassica, Gessica and Shessica heading off to book club. 🙄

🌹Jo and her son Alfie moved away from the big city to live closer to her mother in a quaint beach town. Jo is a part time real estate agent, but spends most of her time concerned about her son, his experience with bullying and being ostracized by his peers (*cough cough Big Little Lies?). In order to get her son into the cool kids club, Jo takes part in a gossip session about a notorious child killer that is rumored to have moved to her small town. Jo slowly becomes obsessed and spends much of her time researching and reporting on this infamous killer. Suspicions escalate quickly and fingers are pointed. No one knows who should be trusted and Jo’s safety is soon at risk when she becomes the one that is threatened...risking not only her life but the life of her son.

🌹Ohhhhhh a murderous gossip circle. Puhlease. If this was even remotely plausible, we’d all be murdered because that’s what the entire human race is best at...gossiping. Good lord. But the over-arching storyline just screamed “Big Little Lies: the lame life”. It was just soooo generic, there was no backstory to many of the side stories and the “red herrings” were the equivalent of tricking a dog out by fake throwing a stick when playing fetch. It was so contrived and typical of the current “thriller shenanigans” that have been flooding readers as of late. No. Thank. You.

The Rumor was a fine read. It’s quick and has twists and turns. My problem was that some of those twists seemed a bit contrived and predictable. Overall it was not that memorable. I read a lot of thrillers and this wasn’t as thrilling as I would have hoped. I recommend you read it and see for yourself which team you’ll join. Or if you looking for something with plot twists that’s not overly gory or stressful check this one out.

I was pleasantly surprised by the twist in this book! It totally blindsided me.

Joanna has recently moved back to her hometown to be close to her mother for help raising her son on her own. Jo and her son have trouble fitting in at first, so when she tries to join the club, she finds herself spreading a rumor she doesn’t really believe or care much about. She feels increasingly bad about it because of how the rumor takes on a life of its own.

What Jo finds out about her own relationships as a result of the rumor turns her life upside down.

If you enjoy thrillers, this book is for you. Thank you to Netgalley for the ARC.

2.5* - good ending but too many characters made it difficult to keep up

https://literallaura.home.blog/2019/08/15/whisper-down-the-alley/

I read this in 2 sittings … oh my GAWD I thought I had it totally figured out & was getting really bored, nope, nopety NOPE I wasn’t even C L O S E !! I loved this one

Joanna wants to be included. When she hears a rumor, then repeats it, she is sure this will give her an in. What Joanna doesn't realize, however, is that she has unleashed something she can never turn back from. The actual rumor is that a woman who killed when she was a child, is living under a new identity right under their noses. So, everyone wonders who this supposed killer is.

Everyone seems rather suspicious. What's more is that just by expounding this rumor Joanna and her young son are now in the path of a psychopath. Regret will not do Joanna a bit of good. After the rumor, when Joanna begins getting threatening notes, supposedly from the killer of many years ago, she no longer feels secure. Instead, she must now focus on keeping herself and her loved ones safe.

Joanna is not alone with things, fortunately for her, her partner, and her son's father, Michael, is a journalist who is not leaving any stone unturned. This certainly raises the intensity of everything going on.

Who would have ever thought that a rumor could lead to so much chaos and danger? What of the woman, acquitted of the murder, trying to lead a quiet life? Well, nothing is quiet for anyone any longer. The twists and turns in this book will keep you both guessing and on the edge of your seat. This debut book is of the highest caliber and I definitely look forward to reading much more by her.

Many thanks to Ballantine Books and to NetGalley for this ARC to review in exchange for my honest opinion.

Why did someone adapt this from the original, set in England, to another version set in the United States? I wish I could have read the original, but it was not available at my library and I didn’t realize this is a different version. The adaptation was quite clumsy, they did not adopt US colloquialisms, using “phone” as the verb for “call” and “perhaps” instead of “maybe,” as two examples. It was like a bad American English translation of a British English book. And, the idea of a babysitter‘s club for adults is something I have never heard of here. Also, Dearborn is not so close to Chicago as the book implies, and when you’re from the Great Lakes region you refer to the water as “The Lake,” not “seaside” or whatever terms they used here.

So this aspect of this version of the book was frustrating, and there were a lot of other parts I didn’t like as well.

Those are: the characterization was very weak, too many characters, not enough distinguishing characteristics, not enough visual description to be able to see them and differentiate them as characters in your head. None of the relationships felt authentic. Not one.

Racism was a minor subplot, but very sporadically, and its execution felt ham-handed and incomplete. Tension-building also felt haphazard and incomplete.

I was intrigued by the outline of this story and see how it could make a terrific movie, but all of the flaws mentioned above would need to be addressed.

This could end up being the rare instance where the movie version of a story is better than the book version. I like this author, but this was not the book.