Boon's Bookcase

The Girl in The Red Coat by Kate Hamer Blog Tour

Welcome to 2016! and this is the first of what I hope to be many blog tours for this year!

Synopsis

Eight-year-old Carmel has always been different - sensitive, distracted, with an heartstopping tendency to go missing. Her mother Beth, newly single, worries about her daughter's strangeness, especially as she is trying to rebuild a life for the two of them on her own.

When she takes Carmel for an outing to a local festival, her worst fear is realised: Carmel disappears into the crowd. Unable to accept the possibility that her daughter might be gone for good, Beth embarks on a mission to find her. Meanwhile, Carmel begins an extraordinary and terrifying journey of her own. But do the real clues to Carmel's disappearance lie in the otherworldly qualities her mother had only begun to guess at?

Review

I always find books about missing children very disturbing, but this book is not like your run of the mill missing child novel.

Carmel is eight years old and has a habit of disappearing from her Mum, but soon turns up except for the time they go to a book festival and Beth's worst fears materialise, Carmel disappears.

The book then tells the story of what happens next with Carmel and the person who takes her, but also the story of Beth's journey in coming to terms with her daughter's disappearance. 

Carmel is a very independent child, who seems more mature than her eight years, but in other ways she shows some strange behaviour that her parents pick up on. Carmel is a dreamer and a bit too trustworthy, something that comes back to haunt her when she is taken away from her mother.

I was gripped from the start with this book and as much as I was a bit frustrated with Carmel being so dreamy, I couldn't help but like her. She was a kind girl who wanted to be friends with everyone, even to the person who took her, she believed they were doing it for the right reasons.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book and thought it was a brilliant debut by Kate Hamer. If you want to know what happens in the end, I suggest you get yourself a copy!! The mark of a great author is when the ending leaves you wanting more and I certainly wanted that! I have a bit of a book hangover already and it's only the beginning of January!!

Thank you to Sophie Portas at Faber & Faber for sending me a copy to review.