Review: 'The Girl Upstairs' by Georgina Lees

I have spent quite a bit of time living in major cities and there is a high chance of fully disconnecting from the masses there. So what if you have a particularly noisy neighbour, who you can't help but notice? And what if they suddenly go silent? You get something like The Girl Upstairs, if everyone involved is highly dramatic. Thanks to One More Chapter and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. My sincere apologies for the delay in reviewing!

Pub. Date: 9/12/2021
Publisher: One More Chapter

How well do you know your neighbour?Would you trust them with your life?

I heard Emily before I saw her. The harsh smack of heels against cheap wooden floorboards. The loud phone calls. The incessant music.

I knew Emily before I met her. Discarded receipts in our communal hallway. Sticky leftovers in the shared food waste bin. Wine shop vouchers in the letterbox.

Now she’s gone missing, and I’m the only one who can find her. The only one who can save her.

Because I know her best, and I heard everything.

The Girl Upstairs is a spine-tingling psychological thriller of grief and obsession that explores how lonely London can be and how sometimes it’s our neighbours who see us most, who know us best…

The thriller genre truly thrives on women getting up to nonsense because of feelings. I don't intend this to sound pejorative in any way. Some of my favourite books are about women getting up to nonsense because of their feelings. Sometimes, though, the nonsense is a little too nonsensical and the feelings too strong. In The Girl Upstairs there is something slightly weird about how the two main characters (if we consider Emily a full protagonist) become entangled, but this was fine for me. Part of critical reading is suspending disbelief, so although I would probably not get heavily involved in the police case around a neighbour I found annoying and didn't really know, I can appreciate that Suzie does, for the plot. How she goes about this however, the way she wavers between debilitating grief and sudden obsession, doesn't entirely flow, however. I think there is a really intriguing story here in which a grieving woman uses another woman's potential tragedy to get herself back out there, but The Girl Upstairs doesn't quite go there. It's always on the edge of letting Suzie be a little selfish, a little less devoted and self-sacrificing in her mindset, but it never fully commits to it. Similarly, Emily is on the edge of being a go-getter, a woman who lives loudly, but the book reins that back in to make her sad as well. Perhaps, if we are going to look at women getting up to nonsense, we can at least make them do so consciously and with their full chest.

Suzie hates the noise of London, how she disappears into its bustling everything. She prefers staying at home and not going into her bedroom, not since he left. Who is he? Her husband, whose absence had Suzie sink into something very like a depression. She's not entirely alone though, as her upstairs neighbour is an especially loud young woman called Emily. Suzie can hear everything she gets up to, until suddenly, after a particularly loud night, she goes quiet and then seems to disappear. When no one seems to particularly care about where Emily is, Suzie begins to venture out to find answers herself and getting wrapped up in the madness. Suzie is a complicated character to like, mainly because she dissolves into tears every few pages. I have never lost a partner, but I have lost loved ones and so I know how heavy grief can be. For some readers, Suzie's portrayal might be very genuine and that is absolutely valid. For me, it eventually felt a bit repetitive and I didn't fully buy her transition into healing. Emily is a cipher, even though we get some chapters from her POV about halfway through the book. Neither of the two women feels fully real, caught up as they are in various cliches and tropes. Especially Emily's backstory weakened her somewhat as a character in my eyes, turning her from a potential go-getter to someone who was clearly positioned as a victim and not much more.

This was my first read by Georgina Lees and I'm somewhat torn. There were definitely moments in The Girl Upstairs where I wondered why I was still going. At roughly 400 pages, it is not a short book and yet I moved through it quickly. Never before was a publisher title so apt, because I did keep thinking that surely, One More Chapter couldn't hurt. Lees somehow got me, even though the pacing is very slow and I wasn't particularly into Suzie nor found Emily very intriguing. There is drama though, all kinds of big betrayals and twists and tears, and sometimes that is what you need. I will say that I didn't fully like the ending. It is very neat, in many ways, but the ultimate reveal and how it happened where so fast that it almost felt besides the point. I think that is because The Girl Upstairs is caught between wanting to be a thriller and wanting to be a book that explores grief. There is a good thriller plot here and there is a potentially good story about grief, but the two don't fully go hand in hand. Whether that is because of the somewhat callous nature to most thriller plots or because of the slow pacing, which sucks the air out of much of the plot, I'm not sure though.

I give this book...

3 Universes!

Considering I didn't fully buy into this book, I did race through it. The drama has a certain pull and I did keep hoping for certain things to work for me. Even though they didn't, I can't say I didn't enjoy reading it.