📖 BOOK REVIEW⠀📚 The Spires
AUTHOR: Kate Moretti @katemoretti1
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Stars: ⭐⭐⭐1/2 + 🐰
Published: September 21, 2021
The Review 📚 The Spires
✨ The Title/Cover Draw:
- I really liked The Girls of Brackenhill so when this book popped up, I grabbed it. Thank you to @netgalley (and the publisher) for allowing me to read this book ahead of publication.
💜 What I liked:
- There was a pretty major spoiler at the end that was really unexpected. I did like the present time period as there were a lot of mysterious things that kept the story moving. This story is told between the present, with Penelope and Willa, and then back to the past when the group lived in the church.
😱 What I didn’t like:
- The past chapters dragged a bit. I didn’t enjoy them as much as the present, wishing there were more nuggets to be had to move the story more.
🚦 My face at the end: 😖
💭 3 Reasons to Read:
- 1. A house in a church
- 2. Intrigue
- 3. That twist at the end
🕧 Mini-Summary:
- Pip’s world is turned upside down when her college roommate Willa shows up. Does this have something to do with their past, a church turned house, and a fire?
I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own. Received from Netgalley.
📘 Summary 📚 The Spires
A troubled woman becomes consumed by a past she’s desperate to forget in this unsettling psychological thriller from the New York Times bestselling author of The Vanishing Year.
Strung between two teenagers, an unemployed husband, and a tenuous career, Penelope Cox barely has her life together when the past comes knocking at her door. Willa Blaine, her old roommate, needs her help: refuge from an abusive husband. “Two weeks tops,” she says—but it’s not the imposition that bothers Penelope; it’s the memories Willa brings with her.
Twenty years earlier, Penelope, Willa, and three friends lived together in a converted church. Insular and closed off from the rest of the world, the five roommates formed their own dysfunctional family, celebrating the pinnacle of their lives; they called themselves “the Spires.” But nights of wild parties gave way to a darker undercurrent: jealousy, resentment, unrequited love, and obsession. Tensions boiled over during a night of debauchery that ended in a deadly fire, leaving the Spires scattered and forever changed.
Now Willa is the perfect houseguest: accommodating, helpful, bringing a newfound sense of excitement to the Cox household. Yet Penelope can’t help but feel the cracks in her life widen as she begins to question Willa’s motives. Everyone has secrets, it seems—and the fire may have brought down the Spires, but not everything burned was forgotten.