@TheWriteReads #BlogTour ‘The Cousins’ by Karen McManus

About the book…

The Storys are the envy of their neighbours: owners of the largest property on their East Coast island, they are rich, beautiful, and close. Until it all falls apart. The four children are suddenly dropped by their mother with a single sentence:

You know what you did.

They never hear from her again.

Years later, when 18-year-old cousins Aubrey, Milly and Jonah Story receive a mysterious invitation to spend the summer at their grandmother’s resort, they have no choice but to follow their curiosity and meet the woman who’s been such an enigma their entire lives.

This entire family is built on secrets, right? It’s the Story legacy.

This summer, the teenagers are determined to discover the truth at the heart of their family. But some secrets are better left alone.

Huge thanks to the ever awesome The Write Reads for the blog tour invite and Penguin for the gifted ebook copy of Karen McManus’ latest novel, ‘The Cousins’ which is out now!

The way that the plot twists and turns, double backs on itself and still has oodles of tricks left to play on the reader, has swiftly become one of Karen’s trademarks. In this, her fourth novel, she takes the notion of consequences for actions being meted out on subsequent generations, and shows, through courage and fearlessness, that the young cousins can redress the balance and restore a sense of justice.

Invited to Gull Cove Island to take up a prestigious summer holiday job, Milly, Jonah and Aubrey feel that they have the potential to question their grandmother, Mildred, about why she disinherited their parents decades earlier.

A one sentence letter, ‘You Know What You Did’, delivered by the family lawyer, lingers over the cousins lives and they have questions that their parents are unable to answer. The elder Storys, Allison, Archer, Adam and Anders (all initals are ‘A Story’, get it?) are disaffected, and seperated from each other meaning that the younger cousins have no familial connections. Being based on an island leaves them with little chance to escape and each of them has their own reason for accepting Mildred’s propostition.

But as they reveal themselves to each other and begin to piece together what happened in the mid to late 90’s, the story is intercut with their parent’s last summer on the island. As they get closer to the truth and make the most of the opportunity presented to them, their grandmother seems as remote and as distant as ever. What is she hiding and will the three young teens get to write their own story?

It’s am enjoyable read which requires some suspension of disbelief, and not that difficult to work out what was going on, but all the same, this is an enjoyable read which wiled away an evening and would be great for older teens for Christmas.

About the author…

Karen M. McManus is the #1 New York Times, USA Today, and international bestselling author of ‘One Of Us Is Lying’, ‘Two Can Keep A Secret’, and ‘One Of Us Is Next’.

Her fourth novel, ‘The Cousins’, will publish in December 2020.

Her work has been translated into more than 40 languages worldwide. Karen lives in Massachusetts and holds a master’s degree in Journalism from Northeastern University, which she mostly uses to draft fake news stories for her novels.

Links-http://www.karenmcmanus.com/

Twitter @The_WriteReads @writerkmc @PenguinBooks