Review: 'The New Home' by Chris Merritt
Pub. Date: 9/7/2021
Publisher: Bookouture
Freya loves her new home on a quiet suburban street. And her beautiful neighbour Emily is everything she’s ever wanted in a best friend. Finally, she has somebody to share her secrets with over a glass of wine. But as Freya watches her new friend setting the table for dinner one evening, she sees something shocking that makes her think that Emily’s life might not be as perfect as it seems. Days later, Emily and her daughter vanish…
When you meet Emily’s husband, you will think you know what he’s hiding.
You will ask yourself whether Emily and Freya really did meet by chance.
You will think you know what happened to Emily and her little girl the night they went missing.
But when you discover the truth, it will shake you to your core and you will lie awake at night wondering if you can ever really trust the people in the house next door…
Freya and her fiancé Jack have found their dream home. It's a bit of a fixer-upper, sure, but it has potential. And the neighbours seem lovely, or at least interesting. But then, a few months later, their neighbour Emily and her daughter disappear. No one seems to be looking for them, but Freya can't let it go, especially after she experiences a tragedy herself. So she starts digging and the further she goes the more she becomes unsure of everything she thought was safe. The New Home ticks a lot of different boxes for the domestic suspense genre. There is a close friendship between two women, a lovely home, a creepy attic, lazy police, a suspicious husband, and a tired fiancé. So technically The New Home should be a great read and yet it just didn't click with me. A lot of this comes down to there being a lot of telling, instead of showing. Merritt skips almost directly to Emily's disappearance and we get her friendship with Freya only in flashbacks. This didn't really work, especially once we begin to suspect Freya isn't super reliable. We didn't see their friendship grow, so we can't entirely buy into it. While I enjoyed the twists and turns, it felt low stakes to me since I couldn't connect to it. The ending of The New Home then also feels very sudden and didn't entirely satisfy.
My main issue with The New Home is the protagonist. I don't, necessarily, ascribe to the adage that men can't write women, but then you read books like this and realise that even well-meaning men don't necessarily get it right. Freya is a bit of a mess, which in and of itself is very interesting. But Freya is messy to the extent that it's no longer a character flaw, but a writing flaw. Merritt seems to consistently undermine her, in the hopes of crafting an unreliable narrator. Mix in mental health issues, fertility issues, and feminism, and you get a female character that is less a character and more a paradigm of "unreliable psychological thriller woman". Freya will blame the patriarchy for everything, even if the issue is her. She will consistently misinterpret things and then regret that, only to do the same thing a page later. She will learn a lesson and forget it. She has an incredibly eye for detail, which is consistently missing in crucial moments. What frustrated me here, I guess, is that Merritt set up Freya to be a very interesting character, but then weakens or undermines her as the plot demands. Change the character or change the plot, but don't switch them back and forth as you think fits. I have seen a lot of praise for Chris Merritt, so perhaps this is simply a misfire, which is absolutely allowed. I will probably read another one of his books in the future, just to double check.
I give this novel...
2 Universes!
Sadly The New Home did not do the trick for me. A lot of the choices made by Merritt didn't resonate with me, or even struck a wrong chord. I have, however, heard many positive things about him, so I will be giving one of his other books a try.
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