My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Genre: Horror, Paranormal
📖 This collection contains four short stories:
• The Visitors Book
• The Last Boy to Leave
• Justified True Belief
• All the dead mothers of my daughters friends
✍️ The Visitors Book is a story about Victoria and her strange partner Aaron who get into a huge row when she refuses to sign the visitors’ book at his London flat. Although from the short glance Victoria had at the book, there is something rather peculiar about the names in it, soon Victoria realises she could be in danger.
👫 The Last Boy to Leave is a heartbreaking short story and probably my favourite within the book. After relocating to a new area, Jen and Greg decide to throw their son Max a birthday party in their home. It soon descends into chaos with kids, running around everywhere, practically destroying the house and ignoring all Jen’s rules. Yet one young boy stops and helps Jen to clean and tidy, he’s polite and kind, yet something is not quite right about him.
👓 Justified True belief is such an interesting short story centred around medical health. The theory is pretty much those with an illness can detect others with the same illness. It’s very difficult to say more than that without spoiling it but it was a really good concept and I would have happily read this as a longer story/novel as it seems to have a lot of possibilities.
🗺 All the dead mothers of my daughters friends was probably my least favourite of the collection. It was probably quite accurate but it pretty much focused on snarky in-fighting between mothers at a school playground.
🗣 I often think it’s useful to see an extract of a book to get an idea of the writing style. Here is a brief extract so that you can see a sample of the writing yourself:
Aaron closes his eyes. ‘Will this argument ever end?’ he murmers.
‘Would you prefer me to back down and say, “You’re quite right, I’m so sorry”?’
‘Yes, I would. And then I’d like you to sign my visitors book.’
‘Jesus! Your obsession with getting me to sign that stupid book is bordering on the creepy, Aaron. Why does it matter so much to you?’
💭 Overall View: I enjoy a good ghost story and this was an enjoyable, short, sweet collection. I preferred The Last Boy to Leave and Justified True Belief to the other stories. They had just the right level of creepy and believable to them which I prefer. All in all, though an enjoyable collection and I look forward to reading more by this author.
👍 Please leave a like if you think my review/feedback of the item was helpful to you. Alternatively, please contact me if you want me to clarify something in my review.
New2Writing 
I often like Sophie Hannah very much, but sometimes I don’t. The trouble is I can’t tell which it will be from the blurb.
That sounds like it sums up this collection, too 🙂
Aaah, so her writing is quite mixed? I was troubled writing this review because I really liked some stories and not others so the best thing I could do is break it down into individual summaries. KL ❤
Very succinct review, I like how you reviewed each story, it gave a better insight into the collection
Yes, I was having a few issues as I really preferred some stories over the others so the easiest thing I could do was split them into individual summaries. An interesting writer for sure, but some stories were more enjoyable than others. KL ❤
A very good book review
Thank you. KL ❤