Book Review: "The Perfect Child" by Lucinda Berry

Lucinda Berry's books seem to have captured me in the way very few thrillers often do. Ah who am I kidding, I get into overwhelmingly dark and thrilling books so often it's actually difficult to get out of them once I'm in. I often get upset or jittery if I get disturbed in the midst of them purely because I really want to know what happens next. The Perfect Child by Lucinda Berry is dark like Saving Noah, but not in the same way. It has that multiple narrator on-beat pacing and a strange, twisted story. For a long time, you genuinely don't see what's going on - until you finally do.

Janie is a little girl found in a car park battered and bruised from possible child abuse, she's taken to the hospital in order to receive treatment. This is where she would meet Dr Christopher Bauer - a surgeon married to one of the nurses, Hannah. When it comes to other people, Janie simply doesn't gel to them like she gels to Janie. To Christopher, this could not have been better since Hannah was having trouble getting pregnant. We can all see where this is going and well, Lucinda Berry doesn't make it easy to see what's going on. We too, hold out much hope for what we know is going to happen.

Unable to find her father and find out her mother is dead, Janie is about to be sent into care, but Christopher and Hannah don't want to see this girl who has already been through so much to get lost in a system that is seemingly cold towards her. They take her in temporarily and they find out what other people had been talking about. Janie would often start screaming - like primal screaming. Lucinda Berry carries us over the threshhold of empathy as we are put face-to-face with a child who is experiencing deep-seated trauma. But we are also met with people who are ill-prepared to take care of her with some very real consequences. It is both a tragic story and a scathing rebuke of the broken system of social work. This is all revealed in the chapters narrated by Piper Goldstein, the social worker assigned to the case.

But then Janie is permanently homed with the Bauers, and Hannah is getting worried about Christopher's attachment to a child who's behaviour is getting so bad that she has started rubbing her own fecal matter on the walls of her bedroom. On top of that, Hannah is pregnant, ultimately giving birth to a son named Cole. She takes to locking the dangerous child in her room whilst Christopher is at work. But when Christopher comes home to find out it had been happening for weeks, he is so angry he hits his wife. Lucinda Berry is giving us a multi-layered story in which we don't know who the victim is and the aggressor is. But when an 'accident' brings Christopher home in which Cole may have bleeding on the brain due to a brain injury, Janie is in the hospital as well and Hannah has to be sedated from all of her screaming - we know there is something more at play here, we just need to dig and find out.

When Hannah ends up in a psychiatric ward and Christopher has to try and hold himself together, there is even more happening on the outside. Hannah's sister Allison, is her very best friend and since Cole and Janie are in the hospital and under the watch of social workers, Allison is told that there is not much chance that Cole and Janie will get to go straight home when they get out of the hospital. Allison, wanting to help her sister takes both of the children into her own home, with her own twin boys. But does Allison really know what she's walking towards? No, no she doesn't. And that's not even the start of it. Lucinda Berry weaves a near-perfect thriller.

As you can see, I was obsessed with this book. I wanted to read it all in one sitting but life got in the way and when it did, I couldn't stop thinking about it. I wanted to know what was really happening here, and I wanted to know what really happened to Janie's mother - especially after that scary conversation we get access to between Piper and Janie's grandmother. Oh, and did I mention Janie's grandmother is in prison? What she says though is far more frightening...