Thanks to Sourcebooks Landmark and Netgalley for a copy of The Sunday Girl by Pip Drysdale in exchange for an honest review.

The Sunday Girl by Pip Drysdale

Genre: Psychological Thriller/Domestic Thriller

Publisher: Sourcebooks Landmark

Publication Date: May 5, 2020.

The Sunday Girl blurb on Goodreads:

The Girl on the Train meets Before I Go to Sleep with a dash of Bridget Jones in this chilling tale of love gone horribly wrong …

Some love affairs change you forever. Someone comes into your orbit and swivels you on your axis, like the wind working on a rooftop weather vane. And when they leave, as the wind always does, you are different; you have a new direction. And it’s not always north.

Any woman who’s ever been involved with a bad, bad man and been dumped will understand what it feels like to be broken, broken-hearted and bent on revenge. Taylor Bishop is hurt, angry and wants to destroy Angus Hollingsworth in the way he destroyed her: Insidiously. Irreparably. Like a puzzle, he’d slowly dissembled … stolen a couple of pieces from, and then discarded, knowing that nobody would ever be able to put it back together ever again. So Taylor consulted The Art of War and made a plan. Then she took the next step – one that would change her life forever.

Then things get really out of control – and The Sunday Girl becomes impossible to put down.

My thoughts

This is a first novel for Pip Drysdale, but you wouldn’t know it. She writes with the assurance of an experienced author, with a confidence that I haven’t seen in many recent debuts. From the beginning of The Sunday Girl I knew I could relax, knowing that I was in good hands: she knows how to tell a story. And what a story it is.

Not what I expected

To be honest, I don’t think the blurb does it justice. It sounds like a typical revenge tale, and in a sense it is. But it’s not only that.

Angus isn’t simply a “bad bad man”: he’s an abuser. Taylor is his victim. This becomes clear fairly quickly, so I don’t see this as a spoiler alert. Within the first chapter, we read how he manipulated Taylor into recording a sex tape of her in a threesome–one that she did not want to do, one that was entirely his idea–and after they broke up, he posted it on the internet . . . with her full name included in the description. That’s emotional abuse.

While I’d fully expected his betrayal to be of the run-of-the-mill adultery type (as horrible as that is, of course), I hadn’t expected this. Neither had she, apparently.

Drysdale flipped my expectations for a betrayal. She took my expectations of a simple petty revenge tale with an unsympathetic protagonist and jerked them out from under me.

By the end of the first chapter, I was on Taylor’s side. While I normally don’t sympathize with those bent on revenge, Drysdale made me sympathize with Taylor after this revelation of her ex’s humiliating betrayal. Once something’s on the internet, it stays on the internet forever. When Taylor says that she’s spent her life trying to be the good girl–the kind, tolerant, forgiving girl–and she’d finally had enough, I wrote in my notes, I don’t blame her, actually!

For people who’ve come out of abusive relationships, this might reopen some wounds. For the rest of us, this story can help us understand why the Taylors of this world do the worst possible thing when faced with abuse: stay.

Characterization

I found Taylor sympathetic, even when she was doing the wrong thing. She’s been betrayed by many men throughout her life, starting with her father. (That’s a doozy, too.)

While she could’ve been a flat-out nasty character, full of anger and hostility, Pip Drysdale makes her more nuanced than that. Everything she does makes psychological sense, at least to me. She’s justified Angus’s actions for so long that it’s hard for her break free from his hold on her. Her heart and head fight one another: her head argues for cool logic, but her heart wants to heal the wounded spirit of her ex-boyfriend.

Plot

The story held me in its grip. Feeling a bit burned out on reading, I opened The Sunday Girl and resolved to read only a chapter or two, enough to keep my Kindle reading streak going. That chapter or two stretched out to reading the entire book in two days.

The plot moves slowly at first, then picks up speed until we’re inexorably rushing forward to the inevitable conclusion. To borrow an analogy Taylor uses in the book, once the dominoes start to fall, there’s no turning back. Drysdale works in trivial details earlier in the book that only become significant in hindsight.

Highly recommended

This was a five star read for me. The book hit all the points I love about great books. Emotional impact. Nuanced characters. Interesting plot. A story with significance, one that helps illuminate the challenges of our modern life. The Sunday Girl was all that and more for me.

Don’t forget . . .

I have a giveaway for Nordic thriller Sister by Kjell Ola Dahl until April 30, 2020. See this post for details and to read a chapter from the book.

If you enjoyed The Sunday Girl, check out 29 Seconds by T.M. Logan, which also features a woman seeking revenge as she battles a predator.