Book Review: "Off the Deep End" by Lucinda Berry

Lucinda Berry is one of those authors where you get lost in the drama. When I was reading Saving Noah I read the whole thing in one sitting and was simply devastated. Best of Friends was a brilliant novel too - there were so many twists and turns and secrets, it was intense. I read The Perfect Child and again, was simply left covering my mouth with my hand and yes, I also read Phantom Limb which is something else entirely. When She Returned had its faults but it was still very tense and very entertaining and now, I'm reading Off the Deep End. It's yet another thrilling read which starts with something earth-shattering. We are then thrown back into the narrative between various characters, each of whom has their own motivations and their own secrets. Each of them: bewildering...

The book opens with Jules who has just crashed her car into an icy lake. In the other seats are her son, Gabe and his friend, Isaac. When Jules manages to get out of her car, she grabs the first hand she sees and pulls him to the surface. It's Isaac. Gabe is gone. Drowned. And so, we are thrown into the story, but in a different state of affairs we are made to go to the present. Isaac has since completely disappeared and his parents are sure that Jules - now a patient, has something to do with it. This is especially when Isaac's phone turns up with absolutely nothing on it. Have you ever seen a teenager with nothing on their phone? Yeah, me neither. Lucinda Berry creates this (and I quote) "soul-sucking terror" as an existential nightmare of one woman who refuses treatment and another who refuses to see the truth. Needless to say, it is all very exciting.

So we get thrown back into the weird time period between Isaac being brought out of the water and him disappearing. Jules needs to see Isaac, knowing that both of them shared a bond of grief, they had been to hell and back together but then, something goes horrifyingly wrong. One day, Jules arrives at Isaac's house, his mother freaked out about Jules' obsession with Isaac, and she breaks through the glass of the door in order to unlock it after the mother does not allow her to see Isaac. The court states that Jules is overcome by grief, going completely crazy. Whereas, Isaac's father isn't counting on the disappearance being caused by Jules - instead he's thinking his son has been taken by another person...someone who has been taking boys about the town. But, nonetheless, there is something very strange about Jules' obsession with a teenaged boy named Isaac. One who has now disappeared entirely.

So let's go through some of the advantages to this book. The first thing is that it is genuinely entertaining and has some redeeming qualities such as both of the mothers being completely insufferable and so you get more hooked on to the storyline about Isaac. The tone of the two mothers very much begins to mimic the 'boy mom' situations you see online and that is very distressing to read. Secondly, we have the fact that there is a strange third thing going on with that serial killer and the children who go off walking their dogs. Lucinda Berry tries to misdirect us from the real situation at hand: what's happened to Isaac?

Now comes the disadvantages: the ending again was not that understandable and was a little complex given the subject matter to begin with. I felt like the second half of the book was rushing me towards an ending that perhaps wasn't planned very well. I sort of fell out of love with some of the characters and ideas that were being explored. I felt like everything was a bit left-field in the end and not only did I not see that coming, I fail to see how it actually made sense. I mean, I love Lucinda Berry's fast-paced style of atmospheric writing which borders on the existential. But there was too much happening and too much being bombarded on me that I didn't know whether that was actually the ending and then it was. It wasn't all that.

All in all, it was an entertaining read with some misshaps though I will still say it was a bit better than When She Returned as it didn't have as many incosistencies.