The Family at No 12 by Anita Waller
Genre: Psychological thriller, Suspense
Read: 30th November 2022
Published: 29th November 2022
★★★ 3.5 stars
DESCRIPTION:
When Janette answers the door to a potential customer looking to board his dog, she never imagines he has nefarious plans.
But minutes later he’s dead and in her cellar.
Weeks later she realises she’s pregnant.
And so she becomes Mother and the baby Child, and a hidden life begins.
But all secrets come out eventually . . .
MY THOUGHTS:
After finishing this book, I still can't decide how I felt about though it definitely held my interest throughout and made for very compelling reading, albeit uncomfortable in parts. The first third of the book is dark and disturbing featuring a few triggers - a brutal rape, murder and child abuse - but then what?
Janette Gregson is something of an eccentric recluse, the product of her mother's warped perspective of the world no doubt, and as a result is pretty much scared of her own shadow. She is too scared to venture beyond her front door much of the time though she does from time to time and the cellar? Well, obviously her mother has scared the heebie-jeebies out of her to even contemplate the dark confines of the abyss that lays beneath the Victorian house. Her mother has since died but her legacy remains and while she has been left comfortably well-off thanks to her mother and grandparents before her, Janette has her own dog kennelling business she runs from her house. It was obvious from the beginning that Janette prefers dogs to people...can't blame her for that. Dogs are the best people I know!
One day she gets a call from a prospective customer who wants to look over her kennels. Not a strange request. Sometimes clients want to see where their fur babies are going to be boarding but in this case, Janette never imagined the heinous agenda he had in store. Within minutes, she is laying unconscious on her kitchen floor as he violently rapes her and she wakes to find him straddling her naked body. By the end of the day, he's dead and laying at the bottom of her cellar steps. And then several weeks later she realises that she is pregnant. She sketches her plans of what she has in mind for she cannot keep this child. His child. And above all, no one must know.
Her plans go awry however when the baby is born and it is a girl. Girls, her mother always told her, are special. Boys, not so much. What is she to do with the child now? And so she sketches out a new plan...where she becomes Mother and the baby becomes Child. She will provide the bare necessities of food, clothing and a bed but nothing else. Child looks to Mother with a smile she does not reciprocate. Child cries for attention but gets reprimanded instead. Child reaches for Mother but is ignored. Before long, Child knows to remain silent. Cries gain you nothing. And as she grows from the drawer to a cot and then to a single bed, Mother gives Child her room which comes with an en suite and in that way Child never has to leave her room...ever. Mother locks Child in who knows no other life but the four walls that surround her. While outside, no one knows Child exists. And Mother wishes she didn't.
If this was the whole of the book, I would have been happy. There was so much that could have been done with this story between Mother and Child to make it even darker and more disturbing than it was...and it really was. Although for the most part the reader is just waiting until Child is rescued so she could go on to a whole new life that was just waiting for her. But it was kind of anti-climatic, to tell the truth. The most powerful part of this story was the first third when it was just Mother and Child. Sure, after she is rescued and the reality of the isolation in which she lived is revealed it is heartbreaking. To discover that she had no name but Child, no concept of anything beyond the four walls in which she lived, no vocabulary beyond the limited words Mother had taught her...is just mindblowing. And to be honest, this was very cleverly written. The child's complete naivety and innocence at not even knowing what a garden or a tree was. The only animal she knew was a dog because Mother had one named Billy. And I loved Billy. Though nothing untoward happened to him, it was always apparent that Billy's time would come and though it was peaceful, I bawled like a baby. He was the loveliest character in the entire story.
When the story took a turn and it became Child's story from then on, things changed. At first, it was heart-rendering to witness the child's innocence. And she was so lovely then. So polite and eager to please. When almost everything asked of her resulted it "will it hurt me?" or "please don't hurt me". There was an innocence to this part of the story that made it somewhat poignant. And then it became something else entirely...
The second half of part two and pretty much all of part three was just weird. Some things that happened just felt a little out of the blue and others were alluded to but never really went anywhere. On the whole, the entire second half felt like a completely different book! Although it featured the same characters, everything felt detached and surreal. And the child was barely recognisable from that of the first half of the book. I felt her metamorphosis was a little unbelieveable and one has to suspend belief to see any resemblance to the Child. I couldn't get a grasp on her really. She would start doing something and then what...? Abandon thought and take another direction? And what the hell happened at the end? I could see it coming but it just made no sense whatsoever. I mean, why? And then that epilogue a year later? What happened within those pages made even less sense...where did that come from? What was the point? In fact, what was the point of the entire ending? By the end, I just felt there were more unanswered questions.
The first half of the story between Mother and Child, as I said, was the most powerful part of the book. It was dark and disturbing. But it was also incredibly sad. Not just for Child, but for Janette too. I saw her as a product of her own mother's making who nurtured and shaped her into the man-hating frightened eccentric recluse that she was. Although she had lived in the whole house alongside her mother I doubt it was an easy life. Janette alluded to that on more than one occasion...and yet she loved her mother still. But her mother deprived her of love as well as books to read and learn, so Janette knew no other way. And then to violated in such a way as she was merely reiterated all that her mother taught her about the male species. So when she discovered she was pregnant, Janette couldn't make herself love a product of such a violent act, nor did she know how to love. She even questioned her ability to love...even with Billy, and he was the closest thing she came to loving. And though her treatment of Child was abhorrent, Janette knew of no other way to process all that had happened to her. Which I found incredibly sad. I didn't hate Janette, I felt sorry for her.
THE FAMILY AT NO 12 could be a very powerful tale had it not incorporated the child's life beyond being rescued. I think that should have been left up to the readers' interpretation and imaginations. It might well have been a happier tale had it been. I really loved the first half of the story, as dark and disturbing as it was, but then it just took a different direction that in the end made no sense.
This is my first read by Anita Waller but it won't be my last as I feel she is a clever and skilfull storyteller and I look forward to seeing what else she has in her library of tales. I didn't hate THE FAMILY AT NO 12. I just felt it was over-extended and ruined what could have been a very powerful poignant story.
But one thing is for sure...it's made me glad I never adopted any children. If I was thinking of doing so, this book would have changed my mind on that score.
I would like to thank #AnitaWaller, #Netgalley, #BoldwoodBooks and #RachelsRandomResources for an ARC of #TheFamilyAtNo12 in exchange for an honest review.
MEET THE AUTHOR:
With many books to her name, she feels she has finally realised her dream, a dream offered to her in July 2015 when Bloodhound Books accepted her first novel, Beautiful. She writes mainly psychological thrillers, but was commissioned in 2018 to write a cosy mystery series, the Kat and Mouse trilogy. By March 2022 this will have grown to eight books, plus a spin-off standalone novel called Epitaph, featuring Doris, one of the characters from the series.
She is now seventy-six years of age, happily writing most days and would dearly love to plan a novel, but has accepted that isn’t the way of her mind. Every novel starts with a sentence and she waits to see where that sentence will take her, and her characters.
As of March 2022 the total number of books published by Bloodhound Books will be twenty. Anita’s personal favourite? Winterscroft, her only supernatural thriller. Her first book for Boldwood Books was published in August 2022.
In her life away from the computer in the corner of her kitchen, she is a Sheffield Wednesday supporter with blue blood in her veins!
Her genre is murder – necessary murder.
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