TITLE: The Last House On Needless Street
AUTHOR: Catriona Ward
GENRE: Thriller
AGE RANGE: Adult
PAGES: 352pg
In a boarded-up house on a dead-end street at the edge of the wild Washington woods lives a family of three.
A teenage girl who isn’t allowed outside, not after last time.
A man who drinks alone in front of his TV, trying to ignore the gaps in his memory.
And a house cat who loves napping and reading the Bible.
An unspeakable secret binds them together, but when a new neighbor moves in next door, what is buried out among the birch trees may come back to haunt them all.
I’m absolutely reeling from how brilliantly crafted this book was. It’s rare that I see a book get this much hype and think it deserves every bit of it, but The Last House on Needless Street does, from start to finish. I feel that this is one of those books where there is almost nothing I can say to explain why it’s so incredible — all I can say is that I am devastated, raw, shocked, and amazed. Catriona Ward has immediately become an auto-buy reader for me, no questions asked.
The prose is lovely and effective, the characters are complex, and despite the fact that I am literally almost never taken off-guard by a reveal, I was on the edge of my seat to the very end and was genuinely stunned by some of the moving pieces here. As a bonus, the audiobook narrator did one of the best narrative jobs I’ve ever heard, and if you’re an audiobook lover, I can’t recommend that format highly enough for this story.
Thank you so much to the publisher and LibroFM ALC Program for providing me with this review copy in exchange for an honest review!
WARNINGS (potential spoilers):
child kidnapping/abuse/death, animal abuse/death, homophobia
queer side character
— destiny ♥
