Nothing much ever happened on Horseshoe Lane – why should it? It was, after all, just a normal suburban backwater with the usual cross section of growing families, ageing pensioners, the occasional singleton and a brace of curtain twitchers. The arrival of celebrity couple, Heavenly and Travis, however, changes all that. This glamorous pair bring about a summer of competitive party throwing and ambitious home improvement projects that will have disastrous and completely unforeseen consequences.
Neighbours who’ve got by for years with just the occasional chat over a garden fence about the unseasonable amount of rain or the state of next door’s garden are slowly united by suspicion as a husband goes missing, a much loved cat turns up dead on a doorstep and Enid from Number Seven is found badly injured at the foot of the cliff.
Could one person be responsible for all of this? Could that person be the strange and unlikeable Hilary Jones from Number Nine? There was only going to be one way to find out and it was going to involve a lot of whiskey….
In this her wonderful follow up to ‘The Rock Star Known as Horse’, Owen’s riveting new story finds a murky side to the suburbs, a side where petty jealousies and neighbourly rivalries can escalate out of all control with calamitous results, all intricately observed with her usual dark humour firmly to the fore.
What does TWG think?
If I had to sum up this book in two words it would have to be – ‘Desperate Housewives’ the sitcom. Anyone remember that? That’s a compliment by the way! Jane Owen’s novel has the same sort of gossipy, snooty and bitchy characters as the sitcom does. Sometimes you just need to lose yourself in a novel full of everything that’s wrong about people, yet so flipping addictive.
Plus, with a book title like this one, how can you NOT decide to read it on that alone? I don’t want to give any of the gossipy, ‘keeping up with the Jones’ ‘ type storyline anyway, so this review will be brief. That said, it is almost guaranteed that you will have met at least one of these characters before in real life.
The author sets the scene for the upcoming storyline absolutely fantastically. It was as though she is gearing up her readers ready for drama central, yet still wanted to paint a picture of an idyllic place to live….BEFORE she introduced her character. Trust me, there is probably a slim chance that you would want to live right next door to these characters if you had to choose. Well, unless you enjoy drama and bitches then you’ll find it heaven.
‘Bitches of Suburbia’ had me laughing out loud, nodding along and generally enjoying the overall storyline. This book is such a change from the usually serious sort of characters I usually come across. A breath of fresh air on every page, alongside many laugh out loud anecdotes and memorable characters. Seriously, what’s not to like about that?
Thanks RaRaResources.
About Jane Owen
Jane’s first novel, Camden Girls, was published by Penguin twenty years ago and quickly became an international cult bestseller published in many languages including Japanese, Spanish,German, Hebrew, Italian and Dutch. She’d already spent many years working in the film business working alongside stars such as Christophe Lambert, Andi McDowell, Daryl Hannah and James Remar before switching to the music business and working for bands such as The Who, Robert Plant, ZZTop and many more. Eventually, even that got boring and that’s when she wrote Camden Girls.
After publication, life became interrupted by an unfortunate traffic accident and Jane moved out of London to Sussex and slowly returned to writing. Her novels don’t fit into any specific category and, frustrated by endless rejections along the lines of ‘You write beautifully but we don’t know how to sell this book’ she started self publishing. Rave reviews gave her the confidence to keep going and believe in what she was writing.
She’s still in Sussex, sharing her life with her musician partner, three horses and a dog and divides her day between writing and riding.
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The Writing Garnet 