The Family Upstairs

From the New York Times bestselling author of Then She Was Gone and Watching You comes another page-turning look inside one family’s past as buried secrets threaten to come to light.
Be careful who you let in.
Soon after her twenty-fifth birthday, Libby Jones returns home from work to find the letter she’s been waiting for her entire life. She rips it open with one driving thought: I am finally going to know who I am.
She soon learns not only the identity of her birth parents, but also that she is the sole inheritor of their abandoned mansion on the banks of the Thames in London’s fashionable Chelsea neighborhood, worth millions. Everything in Libby’s life is about to change. But what she can’t possibly know is that others have been waiting for this day as well—and she is on a collision course to meet them.
Twenty-five years ago, police were called to 16 Cheyne Walk with reports of a baby crying. When they arrived, they found a healthy ten-month-old happily cooing in her crib in the bedroom. Downstairs in the kitchen lay three dead bodies, all dressed in black, next to a hastily scrawled note. And the four other children reported to live at Cheyne Walk were gone.
In The Family Upstairs, the master of “bone-chilling suspense” (People) brings us the can’t-look-away story of three entangled families living in a house with the darkest of secrets.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Atria Books for an eARC in exchange for an honest, unbiased review. Quotes are taken from an unfinished version and may differ from the final product.

Ever since I read The Whisper Man last year, I’ve been on a thriller/mystery kick, so of course I jumped at the chance to read this.

That blurb gives all the creepy vibes, and I am absolutely trash for hidden, likely dangerous, family secrets. I didn’t realize, based on the blurb, that this involved a cult, which I thought was even more interesting.

The Family Upstairs is a dark, twisty novel that reveals its secrets little by little, as a seemingly idyllic family transforms into anything but. It was a wild ride that kept me guessing and gave me goosebumps.

Lisa Jewell obviously has a talent for writing, and I’ll for sure be checking out her work in the future, even though I’ll admit that there were things about this book that made me entirely uncomfortable and I’m still not sure where I fall on them.

❧ The writing is really smooth and easy to read, with consistently dropped foreshadowing that kept me on the edge of my seat.

Mostly, this applies to the second half of the book, when things actually really start happening. The first half is a little slow at times, especially for a thriller, but with enough hints about the mystery to keep me curious and interested. But the second half definitely kicked up the pace a notch and had me rushing for the end.

The story is told with not only multiple points of view, but multiple storylines and an unreliable narrator.

I love me a good unreliable narrator, especially when you don’t see it coming until it’s too late. Which means, obviously, I will go into absolutely no detail about this one for fear of spoilers except to say that it was so well done that when I first realized it, I was like … oooh. And then it made perfect sense.

The multiple points of view and storylines were a little hit or miss for me, though. Part of it is in the “present” and part of it is in the “past,” and it was sometimes hard switching between the two and keeping the threads of both going. The past was infinitely more interesting to me than the present, which is mostly where the book dragged for me.

❧ The story unfolds little by little, with surprises and subversions around every turn.

You picked up a thriller, so you’re sort of waiting for this, obviously, but it’s so nice when it delivers. When you know it’s not going to be okay, but you still sort of hope for something to change, regardless. Some of the plot is fairly predictable, but it’s somehow still a surprise when things happen because you’ve been shouting so loudly at the characters all this time to just see the dang warning signs that of course they’ll listen, right? RIGHT?!

❧ I LOVE books about cults, because they sort of freak me out while simultaneously boggling my mind … and this one definitely delivered with the slow-burn creepiness involved in the making of a cult.

I mean, it never happens overnight, does it? It’s insidious, like all the creepiest things in life. I’ve always been fascinated with the idea of how someone finds themselves in a cult and why they stay, and this book really delves into that. It was chilling and creepy, and the foreshadowing was so well done that I sat semi-horrified thinking that surely my suspicions of what was about to come next was wrong because surely not that. (Hint: I was wrong. It was that.)

The one part of this I thought the book fell down on a bit was there was still no convincing explanation of why these things were allowed to happen.

I’ve read other books focused on cults that despite wanting to give the characters a good shake to bring them to their senses, there was a concrete and obvious path that led to them being in a cult and then convincing reasoning as to why they stayed and allowed certain things to happen. I didn’t feel that here. The more bad things that happened, the more frustrated I grew that no one did anything at all, because I just couldn’t understand why these characters let these things happen.

❧ This book is dark and needs pretty much all the trigger warnings.

If you’re not here for this, just skip on by, because trigger warnings sometimes contain minor spoilers. You know, like you do.

❧ There’s a gay character in this, and the way they’re portrayed feels problematic, at best.

Okay, I’m not saying that just because someone’s gay, they can’t be a bad person. Obviously, evil knows no boundaries, and it’s not like gay people are whipping out their gay card like, “Not today, Satan,” and the Devil walks away with his head hanging, defeated. Yes, gay people can be bad people, but gosh, this is such a horrible stereotype in fiction. And while I can say absolutely nothing about it in regards to this book due to spoilers, by the end, I felt extremely uncomfortable with the way this is portrayed here, in particular. There was nothing nuanced or unique to this character. It felt classic Homosexual Villain™ sprinkled with all the negative stereotypes.

❧ I just couldn’t connect with any of these characters, even though there’s three different point of views. They all fell a bit flat for me and didn’t have much personality.

I mean, I’ve read the entire book and I can’t tell you really much about Lucy other than that she’s a violinist, and Libby is rich. That’s it. Well, and Henry’s point of view has all the spoilers, because it’s the one that deals with the past, so I can’t say anything about him. I’ve read a whole book from the point of view of these three characters, and if you asked me to describe their personalities, that’s all I’ve got for you: violinist, rich, and spoilers.

❧ I honestly didn’t see how Lucy’s point of view added to the story at all. It could’ve just been cut down to two point of views and probably been a more concise, deeper story.

As a point of view character, Lucy added nothing to the overall plot. All she did was add a bunch of minor subplots that were completely divorced from and unrelated to what happened in the house. I kept waiting for the two to match up, and they just … didn’t. It felt like this book was telling two completely different stories, one about Libby and one about Lucy, and I didn’t find Lucy’s story at all compelling or interesting to read. It was just super depressing, and at some point, I dreaded coming back to her chapters because they were the biggest drag of the book.

❧ Henry’s point of view feels very odd and inconsistent in the way it starts in the past and then, at one point, directly addresses other characters’ narratives.

It’s almost breaking the fourth wall, but not quite. I mean, Libby and Lucy’s stories are told in present tense, and Henry’s is past-tense about the house and everything that occurs in it. But then as Libby uncovers more things, there are times when Henry’s narrative directly addresses what Libby discovers in a way that almost feels like him setting things “straight” for the reader. It was a really weird dynamic that didn’t quite work for me, because it was only used a couple times in a place where it seemed like the author just couldn’t find a better way to present this information but wanted the reader to have it anyway. It felt like his voice just changed three-quarters of the way through the book.

❧ There’s a romance in this that feels very forced and out of nowhere and sort of just shoehorned in, as if, at the last minute,  the author said, “You know what this book is missing? A love interest.”

I can confirm, this book didn’t need it. It stood perfectly fine on its own, and I didn’t come here for any sort of romance anyway. I just want to talk about the dead people, okay? The fact that this guy was going to be the love interest was so painfully obvious from the start, and there seemed like absolutely no chemistry between the characters. It was just like … okay, yeah, of course they’re going to end up together, for … reasons?

Have you read any good, creepy thrillers lately? Drop your recs for me below!