Fancy a YA thriller that deals with the ambiguity of truth and is very dark?
Title: The Reappearance of Rachel Price
Author: Holly Jackson
Published: April 2024
Pages: 448
Publisher: Electric Monkey
Rating: 9/10
Lights. Camera. Lies.
18-year-old Bel has lived her whole life in the shadow of her mom’s mysterious disappearance. Sixteen years ago, Rachel Price vanished and young Bel was the only witness, but she has no memory of it. Rachel is gone, long presumed dead, and Bel wishes everyone would just move on.
But the case is dragged up from the past when the Price family agree to a true crime documentary. Bel can’t wait for filming to end, for life to go back to normal. And then the impossible happens. Rachel Price reappears, and life will never be normal again.
Rachel has an unbelievable story about what happened to her. Unbelievable, because Bel isn’t sure it’s real. If Rachel is lying, then where has she been all this time? And – could she be dangerous? With the cameras still rolling, Bel must uncover the truth about her mother, and find out why Rachel Price really came back from the dead . . .
From world-renowned author Holly Jackson comes a mind-blowing masterpiece about one girl’s search for the truth, and the terror in finding out who your family really is.
I enjoy listening to Jackson’s books. Some genres I just absolutely love listening to. Anything thriller and mystery related, are most of the time my favourite audiobooks! Anyone else have that with certain genres? And it also came at a great time when Jackson’s latest book came out, because I had just finished renovating my bedroom and home office! While tidying up and decorating and styling everything, I was able to enjoy the audiobook.
Unfortunately, I didn’t think the author’s latest book, Five Survive, was as strong as her previous and best-known work A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder. It was a bit too obvious and the structure of the story was inconsistent. Still, I was immediately curious when The Reappearance of Rachel Price was announced. However, it was also a disadvantage that I follow Jackson’s work so closely, because in her latest book you can clearly find traces of her earlier works. It is almost as if she used the best points from her previous book to write her latest work. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, many authors do this, but it can be confusing if you have a good memory or read all the books (almost) back to back.
Like the previous book, the main character in The Reappearance of Rachel Price is an unreliable narrator and the way the case is solved is very similar to A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder. The main question: is that a bad thing? No, not yet. However, I do hope that Jackson will create a completely different character in the future, but for this murder mystery it was inevitable that the main character would be suspicious, unlovable and unreliable. It made for a story that felt rapid, because I wanted to keep listening.
Fortunately, there is something different about this latest work, because it reads (listens, in my case) much more like a crime story in which we delve deeper into the characters who are central to the case. The narrative voice that emerges from this, makes it feel like you are uncomfortably close to the characters. You learn to understand why Bel is simply not a nice person, she was made by the environment in which she grew up. I am very happy that the author does not shy away from creating such a main character. After all, it is realistic and at the same time it also creates multiple conflicts, which gives the story a lot of body.
As a reader, you empathize with Bel enormously, but you are also eager to devour this book and reveal all the secrets yourself. Devastating twists come your way that hit much harder because you are involved in the lives of the characters. Unlike the authors’ previous works, this story contains multiple layers around the impact of trauma, grief and family relationships. In the meantime, you share Bel’s feeling of paranoia and extreme uprooting while her entire world shifts and changes several times. Everything is questioned and because Bel was too young to remember this period of her life, you rediscover it together with her. She is a complex and sometimes morally gray character. Her sarcasm is a well-constructed defense mechanism, but underneath it all lies a lonely child who is afraid of being abandoned.
Jackson has always been a detail-oriented writer, but this book shows a clear evolution in her writing style. A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder got dark, but you felt like Pip was guiding the story (most of the time). The Reappearance of Rachel Price feels darker and more inclined to spiral at every turn. It’s constantly about manipulation, and it makes you question everything. Including Bel.
The Reappearance of Rachel Price is a book that deals with the ambiguity of truth and is perfect for any YA thriller reader who enjoys an extra dark story.
Do you like reading a (murder) mystery?
Love,
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