Darling review
Apr. 22nd, 2019 09:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alobearI can't remember where I heard about Darling by Rachel Edwards or why I wanted to read it. But I just finished it in less than 24 hours. It has two first person narrators - Darling herself, a black woman who meets and falls in love with a white man on the day after the Brexit referendum - and Lola, the man's sixteen-year-old daughter. It's clear from the beginning that either or both of these may be unreliable narrators, but the use of misdirection and hints that all is not what it seems are masterfully done. The book kept me guessing till the end, and I was ultimately surprised by what was revealed about the characters of these two protagonists.
The book has themes of both family politics and societal politics and is very cleverly constructed, if perhaps a bit melodramatic and sensationalist in its eventual conclusion. But then it is billed as a psychological thriller, so that's only to be expected. I certainly found it compelling and also horrifying in a lot of ways.
The book has themes of both family politics and societal politics and is very cleverly constructed, if perhaps a bit melodramatic and sensationalist in its eventual conclusion. But then it is billed as a psychological thriller, so that's only to be expected. I certainly found it compelling and also horrifying in a lot of ways.
