A Literary Apothecary

I feel like I’ve heard of Darby Kane as quite a good thriller writer, but this was my first book by her, and it was such a disappointment to me. I’ve never been so grateful for the fact that I get most of my books from the library because I was so tempted to buy this in my local Barnes & Noble. I love the vibes of the cover and the blurb makes the story sound so incredibly interesting, but it was a disappointment across the board.

The will-reading for the wealthy, recently deceased Xavier Tanner goes terribly wrong when a woman who was thought to be dead for fifteen years suddenly reappears and throws the town of Sleepy Hollow into chaos. Aubrey Tanner vanished along with the rest of her family, leaving behind bloodstains in the home and the Tanner business burning to the ground across town. The mystery was never solved, the culprit was never caught, and the family was presumed dead. Until now.

Three women— psychologist Stella, schoolteacher Marni, and café owner Hanna— know more about that day than they’ve ever let on, and Aubrey is pressuring them to finally reveal what they’ve kept hidden. Each woman is concealing secrets about her involvement with the Tanner family, and each of them might have had a motive to kill to cover up those secrets.

Characters

I didn’t really care for the characters in Such a Clever Girl. While the main three did have enough to differentiate them from each other, I didn’t buy into the burgeoning friendship among the three of them. Everything about the relationship felt very surface level, and with the amount of distrust between them, the idea that they could become close friends was too strange for me to believe.

Stella is a psychologist and was involved with the Tanner family through treating their daughter, Aubrey. This could have been an opportunity to really explore what made Aubrey so strange or calculating, but the examples given do very little to provide an idea of what Aubrey was like. Stella is a cousin or a second cousin to the Tanner family, which does tie her into the mystery a little bit, though I would say that she’s more of a vessel to get information from other characters. It really was a missed opportunity to have a character who was so closely connected to Aubrey and the Tanners and give her such a small role in the story. Stella’s mother is more involved than she is.

Her mother is this shrill, greedy, nervous woman who has always felt above everyone due to her relationship with the wealthy Tanners. She knows a lot of the old family secrets, and her age means that some of those secrets start slipping. Each of the women in the story also has a man attached to her, to give the cast more suspects, and Stella’s man is her ex-husband. He’s some kind of lawyer or judge, and he floats around the story trying to discourage Stella from getting involved with the events from fifteen years ago. He knows things about the night the Tanners disappeared, and he wants to leave it all in the past.

Marni is a schoolteacher, and I think she’s the most useless character in the cast. I cannot remember a single action Marni takes that moves the story forward in any way. She does have some relevance in the past, and it’s reasonable that she would be a suspect, but I think if she were downgraded to a side character it wouldn’t have changed very much. She’s excessively nervous, constantly meditating or something, and provides very little information. Her attached man is her father-figure, a retired cop friend who helped clean up after the mess at the Tanner house. Despite how much he knows, he is barely present throughout the story. I think this is because he would reveal the mystery too quickly for the audience. It does make Marni feel even less relevant, though.

Hanna is the owner of a local cafe and the ex-partner of Xavier, the patriarch of the Tanner household. She’s the character that really kicks the story off because it’s revealed in the first chapter that Hanna’s child, Jeremy, is secretly Xavier’s child, too. The trend of her being the central character of the plot continues with her receiving threatening notes and even having her cafe almost burned to the ground. Hanna is actively investigating the circumstances surrounding the will, Aubrey’s return to town, and the disappearance of the Tanner family because she’s the only one with real motivation. She wants to protect her son both from potential harm and reputational ruin. Their relationship is good. It’s complex but loving, and I really liked how Hanna respected Jeremy’s boundaries and autonomy.

Aubrey Tanner had disappeared for fifteen years, but now she’s back in town for the will reading. Her reappearance is treated as a huge, terrifying event for the other people involved, and not just because everyone assumed she was dead. Aubrey is described as being extremely calculated and emotionless, constantly threatening to reveal the women’s secrets and destroy their lives. While that is a good setup for the character, I don’t know if Aubrey was really that intimidating. The most she really did was behave a bit sarcastically.

Everyone was apparently terrified of her as a child, too, and I literally cannot understand why. Again, she’s described as acting abnormally. When she got yelled at, she wouldn’t cry. Aubrey would just watch. When she was angry, she wouldn’t throw tantrums, but her mom’s favorite necklace would mysteriously go missing. How spooky! This just sounds like extremely normal kid behavior to me. I’ve worked with a lot of kids around Aubrey’s age in the flashbacks, and some of them are just like that— low emotional affect, high emotional intelligence types. Children like this understand that when they are bad, mommy takes their toys away. Hence, when mommy is bad (to me), I will take mommy’s toys, i.e., the necklace. It’s not calculating psychopath behavior; it’s normal childhood development. If the author wanted to make Aubrey look like a psychopath— firstly, she can’t really. Children can’t be diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder, which is the umbrella under which psychopathy and sociopathy exist. However, there are ways to make her look more unstable: animal cruelty, setting fires, cruelty to other children, etc.

Basically, I’m just stating that Aubrey was not some horrible child in these flashbacks, so when I, as the reader, found out what she had done in her childhood, I was massively underwhelmed and very thrown off as to why every adult in her life found her so completely and utterly terrifying.

Writing & Atmosphere

This book takes place in the town of Sleepy Hollow, and I am completely shocked by how little atmosphere there is given that fact. This is one of the most atmospheric locations of all time! How is it that everything felt so incredibly flat? I’m not saying that the book had to have some supernatural element; I actually quite dislike when a grounded thriller takes a sudden supernatural turn. However, there are ways that the author could’ve utilized the location for some interesting New England horror and didn’t.

Part of the story takes place in this “creepy” old manor, and while near the end of the book there is a reveal of some hidden passageways in the walls, it doesn’t go beyond that. They are utilized for the story, but only barely. The women spend so little time actually in the house or on the property, despite it being the most atmospheric location. If I’m being entirely honest, I can’t remember where they were for most of the story. I’m picturing blank white walls in a blank white void.

The writing was fairly basic. I’ve said it before, but thrillers don’t really need to impress with the actual writing quality. It’s all about the plot for me. That being said, with a plot this boring and convoluted, it would’ve been nice if I was at least enjoying the descriptions.

Plot & Pacing

I read a lot of my thrillers as audiobooks. For those who might not be aware, I’m a visual artist! It’s nice to have something to listen to while I draw, and thrillers are great for that because they let me sink into the story and forget about what my hands are doing. That being said, at no point did Such a Clever Girl actually capture and maintain my attention on any level.

The pacing felt incredibly slow, especially at the beginning. All of the relevant characters are introduced in rapid succession with little to differentiate them barring a few surface-level traits, and it was very difficult to follow because each of the three women has POV chapters in first person. I was genuinely lucky that the audiobook had different narrators for each chapter because it was the only thing that was keeping the characters from blending together entirely. Their internal voices all have the same nervous diction with only minute differences. Stella is a bit more blunt, Marni is the most nervous, Hanna is tougher. With the addition of a significant number of side characters around the same time, I would say it took me until nearly the thirty percent mark to remember who everyone was.

The mystery of what really happened on the day the Tanners disappeared was so confusing to parse out because each character only tells a tiny bit of the story in their point of view over the course of dozens of chapters, and they only ever tell it in a panicked, frantic way. I’m not saying that drip-feeding information to the reader like this is a negative, or even uncommon, way of writing, but the lack of clarity from everyone means the reader gets very little true information about what happened. The story is being told less like a movie reel and more like a flashbang with one frame of information at a time. I still don’t really understand the exact events in the order that they happened on that day, despite the villain monologue at the end. I don’t know why each of the main characters was in the house, I don’t know exactly what each character did to cover up the mystery, and I don’t know why. I can remember the twists of thrillers I’ve read three years ago, and after three weeks this one has somehow been entirely erased from my mind.

The twists were also very passé. It seemed like every twist was about one character sleeping with another, typically having an affair. It happens over and over again, from the first chapter to the very last. What I think makes this even worse is that the majority of the characters who were actually having the affairs are dead. So, the stakes feel incredibly low. I understand that these affairs or rumors of affairs could have been the motives for the murders, but there are no actual consequences in the present for these affairs being revealed if they aren’t the killers.

There were quite a few plot points that were supposed to be exciting: a fire, a kidnapping, a multi-generational murder, and a mysterious man who might be a secret member of the Tanner family. In a vacuum, they all sound like thrilling plot points, but something about the execution was so mundane that I felt less like I was reading a thriller and more like I was hearing some semi-boring gossip from a coworker I don’t like that much.

Ending

I’m going to try not to spoil the actual main villain of the story, but there are some parts of the ending that I need to talk about because they drove me crazy. I will say, I found the final antagonist to be predictable if the reader is paying even a single crumb of attention to the plot, but that still doesn’t mean I understand the events of the Tanner disappearance at all. I understand the motive! However, I don’t really know how the antagonist accomplished that goal.

My main gripe is with Aubrey and her relationship with that villain. Aubrey was being groomed and sexually assaulted by this person repeatedly, beginning when she was only fourteen years old. This greatly recontextualizes a lot of her behavior that the adults in her life simply attributed to her being a bad kid or a sociopath. She was going through something incredibly serious, and she couldn’t even talk to the people she trusted the most about it because of their relationships to the people involved. Aubrey didn’t even trust her therapist, Stella, with this information. This is not a girl who was acting out because she was an inherently evil person. She’s acting out because she’s in an incredibly inappropriate relationship with an adult. It’s a turn that makes the reader sympathize with Aubrey and justifies some of her more villainous actions because she’s traumatized.

Then, for seemingly no reason, in the last chapter the book does a heel-turn and makes her an evil child killer. I think I just got whiplash! It made me so furious for reasons I find very difficult to explain. I’ve said before in this review that I believe that Aubrey was not some evil, psychotic child. Her misbehaviors are extremely normal and never move beyond the realm of normal. Child Aubrey isn’t killing cats or setting fires; she’s just “odd and calculating.” So, to take a character like this, absolve her of the disappearances of her family, give her extreme trauma, and then try to pull a twist about her being an evil psychopath all along doesn’t sit right with me. It’s not only the idea of a traumatized fifteen-year-old being evil; it’s also that the twist completely lacks textual support. It tells us Aubrey is a psychopath, but don’t support it until the last three pages of the book. Terrible.

Recommendation

I can’t recommend Such a Clever Girl. At no point did the mystery ever grab my attention, and writing about it a few weeks after finishing the book has made me realize how little of it I actually remember. Every twist seemed to be about cheating, every character was either ridiculous or annoying, and the final villain was so predictable. I was bored. I hate describing books that way because it tells you so little about what the actual issues of the book were, but there isn’t a better word here. This book was boring.

Trigger warnings:

child death, infidelity, death of a parent, emotional abuse, gaslighting, toxic friendship, death, fire/fire injury, slut-shaming, pedophilia, adult/minor relationship, therapist abuse.