Little Girls Tell Tales by Rachel Bennett

Thanks to HarperCollins, One More Chapter, and Netgalley for a copy of Little Girls Tell Tales by Rachel Bennett in exchange for an honest review.

Little Girls Tell Tales by Rachel Bennett

My thoughts

Overall, this is a good novel. The premise intrigued me, as I’m sure it does many readers. While I think certain aspects of the premise’s execution fully developed, it still had merit.

The book opens with young Rosalie becoming lost in the curraghs (boggy wetlands). She falls behind her brother Dallin and his friend Beth, and finds herself alone. Then she finds the skeleton.

The opening is beautifully written: the descriptions of the curraghs are appropriately eerie; there’s good tension between the siblings, partially due to their divorced parents forcing them to live apart; and the sense that the marshy land might swallow young Rosalie as she becomes increasingly disoriented. Rosalie is sympathetic here. When she finds the skeletal remains, she feels sad. But when a search team finds her hours later, no one believes her story about the human remains. The police search and find nothing. She and Beth search and find nothing.

When the story transitioned to the present day, the plot became bumpy. Rosalie was mourning the loss of Beth, who had been her wife, and has withdrawn from the world. But we didn’t know all that for quite a while, as the story focused on her need for routine and structure to keep going from some unknown past event. She had withdrawn from the world.

All of this makes sense. I got the sense that Rosalie was a woman struggling to keep her head above the waves of grief overwhelmed her. But it was slower paced in this section than many suspense novels are.

In fact, all the sections that focus on Rosalie emerging from her protective cocoon of routine are slow. It was beautiful writing. But there was a certain lack of tension that made these sections feel extraneous, as if they weren’t fully interwoven in the fabric of the story. They seemed to focus on character development at the expense of the plot. Or maybe the character arc at the expense of the story arc, if that makes sense.

By 40% of the way through the book, I still wasn’t feeling much suspense, and other than some odd threatening letters, I didn’t feel like the characters were in danger. Even the increasingly violent threats against their search didn’t grip me very much.

It wasn’t until about three-quarters of the way through the book that things clicked into place for me. Then it truly felt like a suspense novel. After that, the story raced, steamrolling everything in its path until I turned the last page for a satisfying, if abrupt, ending.

Characterization

I found Rosalie immensely likable. As the years between the skeleton’s discovery and the present, she had developed a habit of “talking” to the skeleton’s ghost. She named her Bogbean, after the flowers that she’d seen around the gravesite. There’s something rather sweet about this. Rosalie was a socially awkward, seemingly shy woman with few friends, and it was understandable that she might feel a bond with the dead Bogbean that no one besides her had seen and no one besides Beth believed that she had seen.

She tended to believe the best of people, but she didn’t comes across as naive, gullible, or stupid, in my opinion.

Cora was instantly likable, too. She was prepared to search the curraghs and determined to search every square inch of them. (She has measured it out on the map!) While she was obsessed over finding her sister Simone, she also longed for normality. She and Rosalie both needed closure.

Dallin, as Rosalie’s older brother, was a complicated and not always (or often) likable guy. He left town under a cloud, hasn’t spoken to their sick mother in years, and lies about, well, almost everything. Half the time I wanted to shake him and the other half of the time I wanted to smack him, and his sister apparently shared my feelings! He did get a small moment of redemption toward the end, though.

Narrative Style

One odd thing popped up in the narration. Bennett wrote most of the book from Rosalie’s 1st person point of view. But at random moments, short passages appeared in an unnamed person’s point of view. We read someone addressing the missing Simone as “you” and referring to an unknown man as HIM. It was easy to guess that these were from Cora’s point of view. But as she addressed “you” (Simone), the narration felt stylistically different from the rest of the book. It was also written in that deliberately ambiguous manner that is often used in current suspense novels.

I don’t think these passages served the story well. Sure, I got to know Simone a bit. But other than that, they came off as superfluous to the main story. Cora covered most of the information when she talked to Rosalie, and reading about “HIM” didn’t pique my interest.

Also, the use of “you” was off-putting to me. I’ve had some bad experiences with the 2nd person POV–don’t ask–and while this wasn’t technically 2nd POV, it flirted with it. This might just be my personal biases at work, and other people might find these passages suspenseful and intriguing.

Kudos to Rachel Bennett for experimenting with a different method of narrative storytelling, though. It’s always better to take the risk of trying something different in writing than to stick with the tried-and-true; even if it doesn’t quite work, you’ve still tried. The rest of the storytelling was well executed. Rosalie’s point of view felt natural and unforced.

All of this may sound as if I disliked the book. Au contraire. I did enjoy it. I read it in one day! It felt more like a mainstream novel with a strong suspense element, though, than a suspense novel.

I particularly liked the way Bennett uses the setting to develop the story.

This book could not take place anywhere other than the curraghs. Like the skeleton half submerged in the boggy land, every character struggles to stay on solid ground. Life threatens to suck them under, swallow them whole. Alone, they are like little girl Rosalie: wandering, searching for footholds, and fighting off panic.

Each of the major characters struggled to reach out to others. Dallin hid behind lies. Cora took shelter behind her maps and obsession Rosalie took refuge in her rigid schedules and isolation. Yet only working together could they be strong enough to make it through to the other side of the curraghs.

Recommended

This is a solid effort from Rachel Bennett. I’d recommend Little Girls Tell Tales to those who like slow-burning suspense novels rather than the high-octane, big-twist version.

Trigger warnings: bereavement, homophobia, missing persons, child abuse, murder.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07S6DBCFT/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i2