Lauren North’s debut novel will take you through a wild emotional ride. It draws you in immediately and will constantly have you jumping to conclusions, then second guessing yourself.
The story opens with our main character Tess in the hospital, drugged and in pain. She knows she has been stabbed, she knows her brother-in-law and her friend were there when it happened, and she knows her beloved son Jamie is missing. Unfortunately, in the state that she is in, that is all that Tess really knows.
Told in a non-linear format, everything takes place in the three-month period between the premature and tragic death of Tess’s husband, and her son Jamie’s 8th birthday. The story unfolds as Tess tries to think back to the tragedy that claimed her husband’s life and work forward to try to fill in some of the gaps in her memory, hoping this will help answer the questions about where Jamie is. Tess’s memories are interspersed with medical notes on her recovery and short paragraphs from a couple of other characters’ points-of-view.
The author does an excellent job of conveying Tess’s isolation in her day to day life, as she deals with her grief. Tess and her husband and son had moved to a home in the English countryside not long before his death, so Tess is in a location that is new to her where she has not met anyone in this sparsely populated area. Tess’s only interactions are with Shelley, a grief counsellor who has been assigned to Tess to help her cope, and Ian, her brother-in-law who she has never had a good relationship with.
North very effectively communicates how (and why) Tess has no idea who to trust. It’s easy to feel the same foggy headed confusion that Tess is experiencing – and right along with her, the reader also has no idea who to trust. Every interaction could be perfectly innocent and well-meaning or could actually be rather dark and sinister.
We feel the depths of Tess’s grief through North’s vivid emotional descriptions of both how Tess is feeling as well as how those feelings have manifested in her behaviour. Sometimes we pity her, and sometimes we grow paranoid along with her.
If you are someone who reads a lot of thrillers, you may find some of the twists a little predictable, but there are other twists and resolutions that will catch you by surprise. Even the turns that you anticipate are extremely well written and well worth the emotional ride to get there.
Overall, The Perfect Son is a fantastic debut novel. It is a fairly quick read, but that is primarily because once you get into the story, you will have a very hard time putting it down. Definitely be on the lookout for any future works from Lauren North!
The Perfect Son is available from Amazon, Book Depository, and other good book retailers.
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Synopsis | Goodreads
A disturbing and shocking debut novel of psychological suspense about a recently widowed mother, her young son, and the lengths she’ll go to in order to keep him safe.
When Tess Clarke wakes up in the hospital the day after her son Jamie’s eighth birthday, she’s sure of these things: She’s been stabbed, her son is missing, her brother-in-law and her grief counselor are involved. But no one is listening to her.
After her husband, Mark, died suddenly in a terrible accident a few months earlier, the only thing keeping Tess together is Jamie. As they struggle to make sense of their new life without Mark, they find joy in brief moments of normalcy like walking to school and watching television together. Life is hard without Mark, but Tess has Jamie, and that’s what matters.
But there in the hospital, confused and surrounded by people who won’t listen, Tess’s world falls apart. To save her son, she must piece together what happened between Mark’s death and Jamie’s birthday, but the truth might just be too much for her to bear.
