Dear Child by Romy Hausmann
Genre: Psychological thriller
Read: 31st October 2020
Published: 14th May 2020
★★★★★ 5 stars
DESCRIPTION:
After fourteen years she has finally escaped. Or has she?
In a windowless shack in the woods, Lena's life and that of her two children follows the rules set by their captor, the father: Meals, bathroom visits, study time are strictly scheduled and meticulously observed. He protects his family from the dangers lurking in the outside world and makes sure that his children will always have a mother to look after them.
One day Lena manages to flee--but the nightmare continues. It seems as if her tormentor wants to get back what belongs to him. And then there is the question whether she really is the woman called "Lena," who disappeared without a trace 14 years ago. The police and Lena's family are all desperately trying to piece together a puzzle which doesn't quite seem to fit.
Gone Girl meets Room in this page-turning thriller from one of Germany's hottest new talents.
MY REVIEW:
OMG! What have I just read? This book was phenomenal! How could this be a debut? It is way too good for that! I seriously felt like I was in a Criminal Minds episode waiting for Derek Morgan to burst in, gun blazing, ready to save the day. Simply put, DEAR CHILD by Romy Hausmann is deliciously dark, disturbingly twisted and super creepy. And one of the best psychological thrillers I have read.
Twenty-three year old Lena Beck has been missing 4,993 days, whens he disappeared after leaving a student party and never returned home. Her father Matthias has never given up hope that his daughter would be found alive...but 13 years later and still there has been no sign of her. Then one day, Matthias receives a call from his friend Gerd Brühling, a police inspector, to say that a woman fitting Lena's description has been found, a victim of a hit and run accident and is in a hospital near the Czech border a couple of hours away.
Matthias and his wife Karin immediately make the two hour journey, eager to see their daughter alive again. But when Matthias walks into her room and sees the woman laying there, he knows at once it is not his daughter. It is not Lena. And so the grief hits them once again. But then...a little girl walks up to the hospital room with a nurse and she is the spitting image of Lena as a child. Whoever the woman in that room is, this child is Lena's daughter. His granddaughter.
The young woman lays in her hospital bed and relives the trauma from which she has escaped. She was awake when the man came into the room and told the detectives that she wasn't Lena...and yet that is the name by which she's now known. So this is Lena's father. But who is the woman in the hospital bed? Her daughter said her name is Lena...but she clearly is not. What should she tell the detectives? What shall I say, Lena?
The woman was abducted and she awoke tied in a basement. She was given a set of rules by which she must abide or else face punishment. When she accepted the inevitable she was then allowed to join him upstairs in the cabin...where she was greeted by her children, Hannah and Jonathan. The woman is shocked. Who are these children? Are they your children, Lena? Is this your husband? But why does he call me "Lena" and the children call me "mama"?
The cabin in which they live deep in the forest has boarded up windows, double locked doors and a re-circulation device which breathes oxygen into the rooms to keep them alive. But is this living? They are governed by a world of rules, locked doors and scheduled bathroom times and never see the light of day. This is her world now and the only world that the children have ever known. The man is brutal if you dare to question his authority or break any of his rules. But the woman bides her time until the day she will escape this prison.
When the woman saw her opportunity she took it, killing her captor then running and running until she saw the beams of a car's headlights...and ran straight into its path. She was vaguely aware of Hannah's voice beside her as the ambulance paramedics asked if she could hear them and what was her name. She heard Hannah's voice tell them "Lena. Her name is Lena." But if she thought the nightmare was over, she was wrong. It was only just beginning...
As the police try to piece the puzzle together, Matthias becomes impatient for results. He wants to know what happened to his daughter and why this woman says she is Lena when clearly she isn't. And then there is the child, Hannah, who is very obviously Lena's daughter. Matthias gives a smile as he realises that she had named her after his mother, her own grandmother. But what does it all mean? Matthias is sure that the woman knows more than she is saying for her story doesn't completely add up. Desperate for answers, he seeks the support of the media despite disapproving of the things they wrote about Lena in the first place. Maybe they can push the police into doing something.
But what he doesn't know is that the children - Hannah and Jonathan - are also keeping deadly secrets. For even though they have physically escaped, they are also mentally scarred.
A disturbingly dark read, DEAR CHILD is a chilling psychological thriller that is fast paced and has you turning the pages at the speed of light, devouring as much as you can to discover the truth about the what really happened behind the walls of the creepy cabin in the woods.
The story opens with a Prologue that is the abducted woman biding her time and planning her escape which swiftly moves into the story of missing woman Lena Beck. As the story progresses we are introduced to three main narratives - Lena, Hannah and Matthias. It's Hannah's chapters which are the most revealing to begin with. They are chilling as she recalls events in a matter of fact way, reciting words as reading from a textbook and ending with a fullstop at the end of each such sentence. She appears to be a twisted little child and one isn't sure what to make of her of her motives. Her quirky traits appear a little sociopathic and her smile somewhat twisted, earning her the moniker "zombie girl" by the media. Is she more involved than people think? Or is she just an innocent victim in all of this? After all, she is just a 13 year old child who has never seen life outside of the cabin or beyond the man she calls "papa".
As soon as I read that opening I became imprisoned alongside "Lena", trapped within the pages I couldn't stop turning in a book I could not put down despite the disturbing and horrifying details of abuse and violence...because I just had to uncover the secrets and find out what happens next. And most of all, the truth behind what happened to Lena Beck.
DEAR CHILD is such an accomplished thriller that it is hard to believe it is a debut. It felt like an episode of Criminal Minds - so dark and disturbing and chillingly twisted. I loved every minute of it. The nightmares the woman suffers, the catatonic muteness Jonathan takes on, the robotic lack of emotion that makes Hannah appear sociopathic. And the broken puzzle that is Matthias and his wife Karin living in the hope that they will one day find their daughter alive. It's the exploration of the psychology behind such a trauma like abduction through these characters is what makes DEAR CHILD such an outstanding thriller.
Creepy and disturbing, DEAR CHILD is a chilling tale with a compelling and gripping plot that will haunt you for some time. To say I loved it is an understatement. Already I have marked the date of Romy Hausmann's next thriller "Sleepless", and I eagerly await the day it hits the shelves.
Overall, a brilliant thriller that is as addictive as it is disturbing, that intrigues throughout and loses nothing in translation. Thoroughly recommended for those who love their psychological thrillers dark and chilling.
I would like to thank #RomyHausmann, #NetGalley and #Quercus for an ARC of #DearChild in exchange for an honest review.
MEET THE AUTHOR:
Romy Hausmann was born in East Germany in 1981. At the age of twenty-four she became chief editor at a film production company in Munich. Since the birth of her son, Romy has been working as a freelancer in television. Her thriller debut, 'Dear Child', became a number one bestseller in Germany and is being published in twenty countries. Sleepless is her second thriller and will be published in June 2021.
Romy lives with her family in a remote house in the woods near Stuttgart.
Social Media links:
No comments:
Post a Comment