The turn of the Key ~ Ruth Ware ☆ Review

Morning!

I did it !! This was my last Ruth ware novel to catch up 😄  Overall I ended up really loving her thrillers- and will continue to buy whatever else she’ll publish!

* Warning; slight spoiler for “The Death of Mrs Westaway” below within the review. Highlight the blank area to reveal *

 

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Goodread’s page

3 / 5 stars

 

First and foremost, I absolutely adore how this book was told via emails written from Rowan to a lawyer. This is my absolute favorite form of story-telling, where you can really get inside the head of the person telling their stories.

As always, i’m truly amazed with the concepts of Miss Ware; One by One had an app where you could “snoop” what music someone was listening to live via spotify, but in this one, we get a house fully digitalized. Everything is on your phone via an app: locking the doors, turning the lights on/off aswell as the music.. even cameras & speakers so you can see and speak directly from away or anywhere else in the house! (Great for keeping an eye on youngins.. but still a bit creepy)

 

However, this seem to be my least favorite one of hers that i’ve read, as it seems to always need one; While I keep going back to In a dark dark wood‘s glass house atmosphere, aswell as Hal’s attraction to tarot & her two mother’s story in The death of Mrs Westaway, this one feels a bit more “erh.”

Despite my love of how this was written in emails, it was one of thoses books I was slower to read.. the concept of a thriller around an au-pair in a creepy “haunted” ultra-digitalized house was a good idea, but didn’t particularly worked for me it seems. Halfway in, I didn’t felt any particular connection with the family – the girls being thoses kinds of kids that I can’t stand, spoiled and just being difficult toward Rowan, trying to make her in trouble to get her fired. Maddie, the oldest, being the worst absolute brat while Ellie fearfully followed whatever her sister was saying to do. Though it was from a good place iguess, because Maddie knew the ghosts wouldn’t like that and an incident would happen.

 

The story was dragging to what looked like casual nanny story; taking too much time to get to the point where I really wanted to DNF but still wanting to get the bottom of it. However, about the last 15% of the book had many little twists- that I didn’t expected.. the last one literally making me tear up at the truth behind what really happened.