#BlogTour ‘The Home’ by Sarah Stovell

About the book…

When the body of pregnant, fifteen-year-old Hope Lacey is discovered in a churchyard on Christmas morning, the community is shocked, but unsurprised. For Hope lived in The Home, the residence of three young girls, whose violent and disturbing pasts have seen them cloistered away…
As a police investigation gets underway, the lives of Hope, Lara and Annie are examined, and the staff who work at the home are interviewed, leading to shocking and distressing revelations … and clear evidence that someone is seeking revenge.
A gritty, dark and devastating psychological thriller, The Home is also an emotive drama and a piercing look at the underbelly of society, where children learn what they live … if they are allowed to live at all.

Huge thanks to Anne Cater of Random Things for the blogtour invite and Karen from Orenda Books for my gifted review copy of ‘The Home’ by Sarah Stovell which is available now in ebook, and published in paperback format from 10th January.

The word ‘home’ is both a physical place represented by the building in which Lara,Hope and Annie have been placed by the social service system and a concept of belonging-each of the three has had their sense of place in the world wrenched from them by the adults in their lives, and as such, they are being kept, for a want of a better word, in isolation.This is reflected in the geographical wilderness around the home, and how they are cut off, in effect, from regular society.

It’s an extremely timely novel, landing as it does in a post election, pre-Brexit world ,where the plight of the most vulnerable in our society stands on a knife edge, with public outcry and concern about cuts in services matched against sweeping policy cuts for the disabled, the disenfranchised and the outcast.

And none are more outcast than these girls.

If it weren’t for a few specific details-such as wages,community cafes etc-this book could have genuinely been set at any point in the last century and stood up as a damning reflection fo the value place on mothers and the girls that they bear.

The problems that each of them face are a combination of emotional and physical abandonment by significant male role models, lack of support to new mothers leading to undiagnosed puerperal psychosis and state created poverty.

The structures in place to support them all fail them spectacularly as one by one, they tell their tale of how they slipped through holes in the net which was meant to catch them.

Hope was meant to be safe from the mother and the pimp who abused her-so how did she end up, clutched in the arms of her only love, pregnant, in a churchyard?

How was Annie ever supposed to recover when the only love that she had ever experienced, born out of desperation and circumstance,was being threatened with permanant seperation?

How was Lara ever meant to find her voice again in a world that never listened to her?

And as well as the girls, the home manager Helen, faces her own struggles to keep the girls safe and set boundaries for them to give them hope, a lifeline as she struggles not to resent the time she spends with these abandoned children rather than her own. A single parent, she sees her own place in the world and her influence on it as a rapidly shrinking light fastly disappearing down a darkened tunnel.

The investigation into Hope’s death, and how she became pregnant is interspersed with the girls own voices as as semblance of how two of them came to fall in love, trying to create a sense of intimacy and contact which both had been lacking. As Helen tries to impose what she feels is fair guidelines and morals on them , she has no idea that these are pushing Hope and Annie to ever desperate ideas to be together forever.

This book will outrage you, move you to tears and leave you feeling hollow at its conclusion. Superbly written, with short, sharp chapters which intensifies the tragedy at the heart of ‘The Home’, this is not a story which is easily put aside. Hope, Annie and Lara will linger…..

About the author…

Sarah Stovell was born in 1977 and spent most of her life in the Home Counties before a season working in a remote North Yorkshire youth hostel made her realise she was a northerner at heart. She now lives in Northumberland with her partner and two children and is a lecturer in Creative Writing at Lincoln University. Her debut psychological thriller, ‘Exquisite’, was called ‘the book of the summer’ by Sunday Times.