Lucy Atkins

When Dee returns from an overnight trip to London, the Oxford College Master’s Lodging is a mess: Felicity, the girl she nannies and who suffers from selective mutism has vanished. Her Danish stepmother Mariah never bonded with the girl and since she has given to her own boy, she is totally exhausted and incapable of taking care of this extraordinary 8-year-old. Felicity must have sleepwalked, something she frequently does during her nightmares which have intensified since they moved to show more the old spooky house. For the police, Dee is one of the prime suspects because Nick Law, Felicity’s father, is convinced of her guilt. So they interview her over several days to get an understanding of the girl’s special situation and the relationship she had with her loving nanny who could never do her any harm, could she?

Lucy Atkins’s “Magpie Lane” is a very clever and creepy novel which brilliantly conveys the atmosphere of an old, dark house where you immediately believe ghosts could wander and haunt the inhabitants. Apart from this, she has created lovely characters who are not only very peculiar but with whom you bond straightaway even though some doubt about Dee’s involvement in Felicity’s vanishing is looming over the story.

I totally adored how Atkins uses the old university town in her novel. First of all, the house itself which provides a long and spine-chilling history, but also the cemeteries and walk ways which have a lot to tell. Apart from the surrounding, the people there also seem to live in the past which is especially tricky for a modern woman like Mariah. Even though she, on the one hand, is kind of “evil stepmother”, things are not that simple. I can understand how frustrating her situation is there: she is just “the wife of”, ignored for not being a real part of the Oxford community and everything with which she normally can charm people does not work here. Additionally, the situation with Felicity is undoubtedly highly challenging for her and then, things become even more dire with her own child crying day in, day out from colic.

Even though Dee is telling the story through the police interviews, Felicity is at the centre. This girl is surely a challenge for everybody but due to Dee’s sensibility you come to love and understand her increasingly. Her nightmares and obsession with death is somehow bizarre and unnerving yet understandable when you get to know her story. My personal highlight was the character of Linklater. The eccentric historian who seems to be completely unaware of the world outside his head fits perfectly in a place like Oxford and plays an important part in creating the somehow Gothic atmosphere.

Atkins’s way of foreshadowing adds to the suspenseful atmosphere and makes it a wonderful read that I enjoyed thoroughly. show less

Dee works as a nanny in Oxford, and has had a series of stints with visiting faculty and administrators, working for the university on a temporary basis. She has just finished one such assignment when the next one falls in her lap: caring for Felicity, the 8-year-old daughter of Nick Law, a new College Master, and his Danish wife Mariah. Felicity’s mother died four years earlier, and she has been selectively mute ever since, speaking only with Nick. Dee sets out to earn her trust.

But show more readers also know that one evening Felicity disappears, and the media and law enforcement launch a major campaign to find her. The novel chronicles, in parallel, the events following Felicity’s disappearance and those leading up to it. As tiny details are revealed, it becomes clear there’s more to Dee than she wants others to know.

The full picture emerges slowly. Author Lucy Atkins expertly weaves a number of plot threads together, and most of the details are revealed by an unreliable narrator. It kept me guessing all the way to the end and even now, while I know more about what happened to Felicity, there’s much left unsaid. This was a great read. show less

This has a gothic atmosphere to it that I liked very much and it kept me on the edge of my seat most of the time and was a hard book to put down.

Kal( Kali) is in a bad place her mother just died and she found some texts on her husband’s phone that don’t look good, and while cleaning out her mother’s things she finds some postcards from a woman she has never heard of and in her mental state she decides to go half way around the world to talk to this woman to find out more about the show more mother she was never close to. The woman she finds is Susannah who is at best an unreliable narrator at worst well…

A lot of this book is at a frenetic pace because it moves along with Kali’s mind which is going in 20 different directions and it’s palpable while reading this book, I felt a sense of the frantic as I read and also dread because you just felt there was more to things and Kali was too wound up to see straight, but the problem is she brought her child along for the ride. The recent death of her mother has Kali in a tailspin she can’t think straight but she goes on this mission to find out more about her mother’s youth what was she like in college and is the reason they didn’t get along because her mother gave up her PhD study to have her? But there is the old adage “be careful what you wish for” because what she finds out may not be what she wanted to know.

I don’t want to give too much away because I don’t want to ruin anyone’s enjoyment of this story. So I will close this by saying I really enjoyed this book; I loved the gothic thriller feel to it and as I said I had a hard time putting it down because I needed to know what was going to happen next. My only little qualm was the ending chapter but it didn’t detract from my enjoyment of this book. So if you like gothic atmosphere, thrillers, and family secrets give this one a try.

4 Stars

I received this book from Netgalley and the publisher (Quercus) for a fair and honest review show less

A thriller about an Oxford nanny whose charge is a troubled eight year old girl with selective mutism. The girl's father and her stepmother are far to busy to spend time with her and they both live in the attic of an old house, which feels haunted. There's even a small, secret room in the child's room that might be a priest's hole, but is supposed to stay locked, because the wallpaper inside contains arsenic. At the opening of the novel, the police are questioning the nanny about the girl, show more who disappeared during one of the nanny's rare weekend's off. At first, she's sure they just want background on the family, but as the questioning continues, she realizes that she might be a suspect and, as things are revealed about her past and her time in this position, the reader begins to think they might be right.

So this was a fun thriller. Nothing substantial, but the characters were interesting, if broadly drawn. I don't generally like when the reader has access to the narrator's thoughts and yet information the narrator knows is held back, but it was not too annoying here. I'm not sure whether the author exerted great restraint in ending the novel where she did, or if she took the easy way out, but it was different. show less