Joanna WallaceCritiques

Hilariously sad. Great multi-layered story. Fun read!

“… I honestly believe Lucas Kane is sorry now. Terribly, terribly so.”

I really enjoyed this book! Especially so, as one of my daughter's friends had recommended it to me! I think Claire is a wonderful main character, and serial killer! And darkly funny too! But still, a serial killer. The fish tank revenge is pretty gruesome! And this quote - “… it’s not just cabbage heads out there.” And, “I may have cut up her baby and buried him in my garden, but there’s no need to be cruel.”

“The image repulses me. It’s never OK for a grown woman to wear a headband.”

“Stillness and silence. The most underrated weapons in any given armory. People will do anything to avoid the discomfort created by stillness and silence.”

“Gutless inaction. The perfect epitaph.”

“Sometimes it’s good to be disturbed,…”

“And that’s when I know. I’ve always known. Exactly what bus I’m going to get on.”

Claire is at her beloved father's funeral when she is informed that she has been shortlisted in an art competition. However, it turns out that she has been mixed up with another Claire and the email was a mistake. Claire seeks out the careless sender of the email, Lucas, for revenge. It gradually becomes clear that Claire takes matters into her own hands in this way quite a lot.

I enjoyed this very much, although there were an awful lot of unscrupulous characters quite apart from Claire. There were also chapters from Claire's childhood which went some way towards explaining how she turned out as she did. This was funny in places and fun throughout. The last 20 pages or so were particularly excellent.½

3.5

Serial killer doesn’t tolerate elder abusers. Has macabre taste in aquarium decorations.
If you like “how to kill your family” and “a certain hunger” you will probably enjoy this.
Unfortunately it wasn’t as funny as I was hoping, and it was definitely violent and hard to stomach. The plot was super dramatic with lots of twists. This wasnt for me but I think the right reader would love it.

This book literally had me laughing out loud. Something about a woman serial killer who is hysterically dark that just sat so right with me. She's just going around murdering until someone catches on to what she might be doing...so she killed her. And the person who she thought she might've told. She thought she tied up all her loose ends, but nope, she didn't. The head in the fish tank had me rolling. Such a quirky fun book and I would buy this if I came across it. I just read that someone said if Dexter and Fleabag had a baby. haha! I believe she becomes friends with the sister of someone she's murdered. I sadly can't remember the end too well. There were also flashbacks to her childhood and how her mother treated her....which she ended up murdering her. And her father seems to know, but doesn't care and raises her. I think I'm just going to have to buy this book since I listened to it so I can remember the ending.

“…I smile, enjoying my favourite part of the process. The part when I know they’re going to die soon. The part when I can anticipate every moment of their deaths. The part when I already see them as ghosts.”

Grieving the recent death of her father, the disappointment of being rejected for an art prize triggers Claire’s worst instincts. Eschewing her usual careful planning, she impulsively takes her revenge, luring art critic Lucas Kane to her home where she dispatches him with the satisfaction death always brings her, but unbeknownst to Claire, someone was watching.

This propels Claire into a battle of wits with a similarly sociopathic foe who has infiltrated Claire’s bereavement support group in order to blackmail her. I enjoyed their attempts to out manoeuvre one another and gain the upper hand. But solving that problem leaves Claire with yet another, and as it happens Lucas’s murder isn’t the only recent killing that is haunting her. Though the later plot tends to rely on coincidence, there are some surprise twists which are entertaining. There are also dark moments with descriptions of killing, elder abuse and child abuse.

Claire’s childhood experiences, revealed in a series of flashbacks, help to explain her compulsion to kill, and engender some sympathy. Still Claire is a serial killer, and her motives for selecting a victim are generally self-serving and petty. I’m not sure I ever warmed to her exactly, but I did find myself on her side, most of the time.

Told from Claire’s first person perspective, the tone is generally irreverent. I found the humour to be dark and dry, rather than laugh-out-loud funny. There’s some tension in the narrative at times but not really any suspense, however the pace is good.

A quirky, diverting read, You’d Look Better as a Ghost is an engaging debut from Joanna Wallace.½