Rebecca Thornton

The lie, the gossip, the consequences! The fallout is going to be huge!

The dreaded school playground ‘It mummy’s’ clique are out in force in this novel that is full of characters that will resonate with anyone who has faced the school pickup for themselves! Every school has them and every school has the gossips. The other parents that like to pass judgment as fast as they pass on the latest gossip, regardless of the effect it can have on others.

The story follows best friends Sarah and Liza as they begin their day over coffee at the local fitness centre whilst their children play in the outdoor children’s playground. Just a normal day, that is until Liza’s son Jack has a serious accident and is rushed to hospital.

Accidents happen all the time, kids hurt themselves doing mischievous things all the time but for Sarah this is so much more than that. Just minutes before the accident Liza had asked her to check on Jack, which she did and she saw him climbing something he shouldn’t, but just at that moment she got distracted by a face from the past, forgetting about Jack entirely. So when tragedy struck the guilt struck her full force and rather than jeopardise their friendship she decides to keep quiet, saying that Jack had been safe and fine when she had checked on him.

But guilt is a heavy burden to carry and the weight and pressure begin to unravel Sarah as she tries to make things right and help and support her best friend especially as the speculation, gossip, rumours and finger pointing escalates. Can the truth stay hidden, will Jack make a full recovery and will the two women’s friendship survive?

This is a really character driven story of friendship, trust, secrets and lies. Some characters you will empathise with, others you will dislike but all will suck you in and keep you glued to this all to true to live group of people and their lives.

It certainly took me back to my school pick up days and it could quite as easily been that very playground they were talking about, except our little village school was not full of the privileged and wealthy!!

If you enjoy a good drama with added suspense and intrigue than this is the perfect book for you!

The paperback edition was published on 2 April is grab yourself a copy now, big cup of tea and settle in for an engrossing read.

With all of us in isolation and in lockdown this is the perfect time to grab a book and escape from the perilous situation we are all facing and get transported by a good book!

If your local bookshop is still offering their services then please use them to purchase your books as our small local independent businesses need our custom more so then ever, if not the you can grab a copy here now without having to leave your house. Plus it is on offer on Amazon for an amazing £0.99!

A massive thank you to the author Rebecca Thornton, publishers Harper Collins and Anne Cater for my copy of this entertainingly good book, plus a spot on the blog tour.
… (mehr)

This is a story about what happens when an accident occurs in a sports club, a lie is told and the subsequent events are not always as they appear. Misunderstandings and paranoia are the result amongst a group of ‘yummy’ mummies who chat on Whatsapp and at the school gates.

It’s a compelling tale of friendship turned sour, how things can spiral out of control very quickly and the guilt which ensues. There is a fantastic and diverse cast of believable characters from the neurotic Sarah and the anxious Liza to the sophisticated Ella. Nobody is perfect in this book as, of course, no-one is perfect in the real world. It highlights our foibles and shortcomings and that, at the end of the day, we are only human after all.

An engaging, absorbing and enjoyable page turner pertinent to today’s world. I read The Fallout via the Pigeonhole app. It’s not the type of book I would normally read, but I’m glad I did!… (mehr)

In The Fallout, Rebecca Thornton’s third fiction novel, minutes after Sarah witnesses her best friend’s young son climbing a pole in a playground, and distracted, says nothing, the boy falls. Four year old Jack is badly injured, and Sarah is horrified, but can’t bring herself to admit to Liza that she may have been able to prevent the tragedy. Desperate to redeem herself for failing to tell the truth, Sarah vows to do everything she can to make up for her mistake, but lies have consequences, and there are some things can’t be forgiven.

Thornton explores several themes in The Fallout, including friendship, parenting, postpartum depression/psychosis, loss, and post traumatic stress. The story unfolds primarily from the perspectives of Sarah and Liza as they struggle with the fallout from Jack’s accident. Thornton also makes use of WhatsApp chat and interview transcripts in the novel to good effect. Amongst other things, they reveal the petty dynamic too often present among groups of mothers, and illustrate the varying social attitudes to parenting in general, as speculation about the fall, and who is to blame, runs riot.

Sarah is an exhausting character, and though I felt sympathetic towards her, I also found her frustrating, and irritating. Her frenzied anxiety, fed by residual feelings of guilt and grief, leads to impulsive, and sometimes irrational decisions, that worsens every situation exponentially, despite usually having the best of intentions. I did feel that the story got a little bogged down in Sarah’s spiral of panic, occasionally teetering on the edge of absurd, and slowing the pace.

Liza is also wound a little tight, not only because of the uncertainty surrounding Jack’s injury, and the complicated state of her marriage, but also due to a past event, which Thornton delays revealing until the very end of the novel. I’d guessed the circumstances that Liza was struggling with early on, so I found the reveal to be anti-climatic, but I liked the way in which the author acknowledged the impact of events on Liza’s husband’s.

The Fallout is a engaging read, I found the premise to be relatable, and I empathised with the characters.… (mehr)

Any time a book touts boarding school best friends who are estranged after something dark happened, my interest in piqued and it's a fairly sure bet, I'll give it a read. So when The Exclusives came across my general book perusal, I checked it out. Alas, not available in the US yet. So of course my next stop was a UK outlet to buy it. I got it into my hot little hands and now that I've read it, it was totally worth it. Funnily enough, I felt this was a 3 star book somewhere in the middle but by book's end, I was firmly in the 4 star feels.

Josephine and Freya kept me turning the pages and while I did think something lacked in the 1996 thread, I was still engaged and eager to find out what happened next. I do admit to breaking off in the middle to locate the chapter of the fateful night where everything diverged for the two girls and then when I went back, I felt things were less meandering. I did wish the secret were bigger but by the final pages of the book, I felt that the secret had so damaged both, it was huge enough. I also wished there'd been more about how Freya got to the point at which we see her in the present. Actually, I'd have liked to see more of both women in a year in the past that wasn't 1996 (maybe their 10 year out mark).

All in all, this was a good look in at a female friendship as touted in the blurbs and it was well rendered how two so close could tear themselves & one another apart. It's not as deep as The Secret History to be sure but it does have more depth than Mean Girls. I'll be on the lookout for future works by Thornton. Definitely recommended.… (mehr)