The second of my reviews for www.welovethisbook.com, Cuckoo, the first novel by playwright Julia Crouch, is a psychological thriller that tells of how a house-guest can very quickly become unwelcome…
Rose, a stay-at-home mother, lives with her artist husband and her two perfect daughters, and invites her recently widowed friend to stay. Polly arrives, bringing her two wild young sons, and sets about making herself at home in The Lodge, Rose’s lovingly restored house. A former rock star, she soon has the village’s men wrapped around her little finger, although Rose’s female friends are slower to warm to the newcomer. Rose’s perfect world starts to become feel increasingly insecure as Polly and her sons take over every aspect of life at The Lodge.
There is much to recommend Cuckoo; Crouch is good at building tension and there is a real sense of creeping disquiet that pervades the novel. Although it is told in the third person, it is nevertheless Rose’s story, and it is pleasingly difficult to know for sure whether or not it is her imagination or if there is really something sinister about Polly’s intentions. Although the conclusion isn’t really a twist, it is nicely unexpected in its details, and isn’t a traditional happy-ending, continuing the sense of unease that saturates the rest of the story.
There are annoyances: barely a paragraph goes by without mention of Rose’s Barbour jacket, Touche Éclat or the family’s Galaxy, which became wearing after 300 pages. The characterisation of Rose was also a problem. She is meant to be an intelligent woman and yet her situation by the end of the novel is absurd. So much of the book revolves around her that it would have been more enjoyable had she been a more sympathetic character. With her predilection for kinky sex and her laissez-faire attitude towards raising her children, Polly is a more interesting character, and it’s a shame that we don’t learn more about her.
Despite this, if you can suspend slight disbelief, Cuckoo is a good, if undemanding, read for a cold afternoon. It might be best avoided if you have house guests though…
March 30th, 2012 at 09:37
[...] the success of Cuckoo, Julia Crouch has written another psychological thriller that is sure to be equally well-received. [...]