Please, no more murdered women, serial killers, bizarre crime scenes, meaningless and wanton sex or amateur detectives. Please, no more trite, ill-conceived plot lines or writers just chasing the dollar without having to deliver anything for it. Please, no more characters who have so little connection to reality that they move like puppets across the page, jerking and flapping and saying and doing ridiculous things, or last minute escapes when it only makes sense that you couldn’t escape. Like a B-movie in which you could write it yourself as you go because the turns and twists are so achingly obvious.

Then there is the condescension. Maynard distrusts her reader so much that she feels she must explain the nuances, our poor ignorant minds might not get it.
i.e. "his own apparent impotence at apprehending the murderer (impotence, and interesting word there, it occurred to me, but that thought came years later)..." Yes, thank you, we probably would all have picked up on that deliberate choice of words, Joyce.

When will I learn? If it starts out like a bad episode (and for me those are the only kinds of episodes) of Criminal Minds, it is not for me. I should quit while I am ahead. Not my genre.

No one made me finish this book--and so I have only myself to blame. I was actually looking forward to this book as a kind of light break from heavy reading; a novel that would not demand much concentration or thought--just a good story. I got less than I expected, even when I wasn’t expecting all that much. I will put Joyce Maynard with Picoult and Hannah on my list of authors I need to avoid.

I need a palate cleanser...a little Dickens or Hardy or Eliot would be nice. ( )

Swedish Review

Året Ă€r 1979 och systrarna Rachel och Patty bor i Marin County i Kalifornien. NĂ€r flera unga flickor blir mördade i bergen bakom huset dĂ€r de bor blir deras pappa som Ă€r kriminalinspektör den som fĂ„r leda utredningen. Deras pappa bor inte lĂ€ngre hemma och deras mamma har sedan hon kastade ut honom pga av att han var stĂ€ndigt otrogen drabbats av en depression och bryr sig inte sĂ„ mycket om vad flickorna gör nĂ€r de Ă€r hemma och trots deras pappas varningar sĂ„ kan de inte lĂ„ta bli att vistas i bergen...

Bergen bakom huset Àr den första boken jag har lÀst av Joyce Maynard och det snygga omslaget samt handlingen gjorde mig nyfiken pÄ boken. Vad jag gillade med boken var mixen av familjedrama och mysterium. En berÀttelse om att vÀxa upp, men förutom de vanliga tonÄrsproblemen som mens och killar sÄ mÄste Rachel och Patty ocksÄ leva med att det Àr en seriemördare lös. Och, det Àr nÄgot som kommer att pÄverka dem mycket bÄde under deras uppvÀxt och senare i livet. Rachel som Àr Àldst har börjat se att hennes far inte Àr den hjÀlte som hon dyrkat sedan hon var liten och Àven Patty har börjat upptÀcka hans mindre smickrande sidor. Och i och med att fler flickor blir mördade pÄverkas Àven deras far av det och de ser hur misslyckandet med att fÄnga mördaren tÀr pÄ honom.

Boken utspelas bÄde nÀr Rachel och Patty var barn i slutet av 70-talet sedan mot slutet av boken sÄ fÄr man lÀsa om Rachel, 30 Är senare, nÀr hon beslutar sig för att skriva en fiktionell bok om sin uppvÀxt och morden. Jag trodde att innan jag lÀste boken att mer av handlingen skulle utspelas 30-Är senare, och jag var till en viss del besviken att sÄ lite av boken handlingen tog vid 30-Är senare, men Maynard fÄr till slutet sÄ bra att missnöjet försvann.

Berget bakom huset Àr en mycket bra bok, jag ser fram emot att lÀsa andra böcker av Joyce Maynard!

Jag vill tacka HarperCollins Nordic för att ha försett mig med ett recensionsex för en Àrlig recension.

English Review

The year is 1979, and sisters Rachel and Patty live in Marin County, California. When several young girls are murdered in the hills behind the house where they live is it their father who is a police detective that is put in charge of leading the investigation. Their father doesn't live at home anymore since their mother throw him out because his was notoriously unfaithful to her. She has since then been depressed and doesn't care that much about what the girls do when they are at home, and they continue to spend time in the hills, despite their father's warning.

After Her is the first book I have read by Joyce Maynard and the gorgeous cover of the Swedish book together with the blurb made me quite curious and I just had to read the book. I really like the mix of family drama and mystery. It's a tale about growing up, but besides the usual problem girls face growing up must Rachel and Patty also live with a serial killer loose. And, that is something that is going to affect them quite a lot during their time growing up and later on. Rachel, the oldest has started to see that her father is not the hero that she has worshiped since she was little and even Patty has started to notice his less than flattering sides. And, their father is affected as times goes and more girls are being killed without the killer is being apprehended.

The book's story both takes place during Rachel and Patty are young at the end of the 70s and towards the end of the book, the story takes us 30 years forward in time to a grown-up Rachel who is planning on writing a fictional book, about growing up and about the killer. I did think before I started to read the book that more of the story would take place when Rachel was older and I was in a way disappointed that so little of the book was dedicated to older Rachel. But, my disappointed went away when Maynard managed to write a truly excellent ending.

After Her was a very good book and I'm looking forward to reading more books by Joyce Maynard!

I want to thank HarperCollins Nordic for providing me with a free copy for an honest review!

Read this review and others on A Bookaholic Swede ( )

I would have given this book 3 œ stars if that were an option.

I thought the relationship between Rachel, the narrator, and her younger sister Patty was excellent. The dialogue, the games they played, their adoration for their flawed father and their damaged mother, all felt very real.

I think this could have made a pretty good YA novel.

I have to agree with some of the other reviewers who have pointed out that there is an inexplicable amount of details that are repeated over and over and over again. And then over again just in case we forgot that Patty has buckteeth. I read this in one sitting on a long flight so the repetition was really annoying. Probably would have been less so, if I was reading intermittently.

The serial killer in the story kills 15 girls and we get a chapter on each one and more. It is oddly a page turner and a drag at the same time. I really was invested in the characters and I wanted to find out what happened next, but because of that, I found myself skimming sections where I more or less knew what was going to be covered.

The big climax reminded me of something that would have been written for a TV movie – a good TV movie, but still sort of conventional implausible action.

( )

I re-call reading "The Good Daughters" a few years ago and thought that though it was written well the story tended to drag at times. I have the same feeling about "After Her". Though this was a well-written novel it drags a lot. Also some parts of the story do get confusing or there is no real resolution to certain incidents.

The story takes place in California in 1979. There is a serial killer murdering young women who explore a wooded area near where our main protagonist Rachel lives with her mom and sister Patty. Readers quickly find out that Rachel's father is a detective and extremely good at his job and his ability to charm women.

As I said the novel was written very well, but the character of Rachel is very bland. We also don't get a chance to really get to know Patty at all who based on that character's description sounded much more deeper than Rachel but was basically a cardboard cutout for the majority of the novel.

Though the serial killer was a big party of the novel I ultimately did not like the conclusion of that storyline or with the story in general. It seemed that once Ms. Maynard traveled beyond the summer of 1979 she just jumped forward with so many characters that the reader does not get a chance to absorb what has happened.

Though the ending was surprising I just felt let down in general with the novel by the time I finished with it.

Please note that I received this novel via the Amazon Vine Program. ( )

After Her is a wonderful novel about two sisters whose detective father investigates a serial killer case, that happens on "their" mountain. The focus of the novel is the maturation of these sisters and their relationship. It is NOT a mystery novel per se, so if you are expecting this going in, you may be upset. I did not, and I just enjoyed the book as it unfolded to me.

Set Northern California in 1979, it also deals with the relationship these daughters have with their very handsome, and chronically unfaithful father, and the mother whose heart he broke.
When we first meet her, Patty is eleven—a gangly kid who loves basketball and dogs and would do anything for her older sister, Rachel. Rachel is obsessed with making up stories and believes she possesses the gift of knowing what's in the minds of people around her.

Their mother works day times, and in the evenings she locks herself in her bedroom with library books. Left to their own devices, the sisters spend their days studying record jackets, concocting elaborate fantasies about the mysterious neighbor who moved in down the street, and playing in the natural beauty of the mountain right outside their back door. And finding a rusty old truck, and random hikers/lovers/hippies on the mountain that looms behind their house in their unsupervised summertime ramblings.

I will not spoil the plot by revealing what happens (a great deal of it in the novel's closing chapters), but I will say that the novel is quite effective. The setting is evoked very nicely, as is the relationship between the sisters and their relationship with their father. This constitutes the thrust of the novel; we hear relatively little about the investigation of the serial killer case as the father wishes to maintain his daughters' innocence in that regard. (The coming-of-age elements of the story receive a great deal of attention and are likely to be of greater interest to women readers than to men.)

I love how Maynard has created a poignant, suspenseful, and painfully real family saga that traces a young girl's first explorations of sexuality, the loss of innocence, the bond shared by sisters, and the tender but damaged relationship between a girl and her father that endures even beyond the grave. And after becoming a renown author in her own right, Rachel decided that thirty years later, still haunted by the belief that the killer remains at large, that she will construct a new strategy to smoke out the Sunset Strangler and vindicate her father—a plan that unexpectedly unearths a long-buried family secret.

In this fascinating story with themes of obsession, dedication, loss, and the unique bond between fathers and daughters, especially when their families have been fractured by divorce. I loved that unlike many fictional tales of this kind, there were no predictable wrap-ups of the case. Instead we had to wait more than thirty years for the denouement that would bring justice and satisfaction to the narrator of this tale. I could not put this book down, and and read it constantly over the course of two days. Invariably, Maynard brings us a five star read that I will think about and remember always. ( )