All I Want by Darcey Bell

Author Darcey Bell blew me away with her debut novel, A Simple Favor, which was later made into a movie. It was a real page turner with so many twists and turns that readers couldn’t possibly see where they were going to end up.

While a sophomore book is hard to pull off after an incredible first book, Bell did it again with Something She’s Not Telling Us, a delicious page-turner that I read in one afternoon because I JUST HAD TO KNOW THE OUTCOME.

The third book is a letdown. In All I Want, the reader just wants to be done and forget about the time wasted reading the book. Ever since Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, writers of psychological fiction  seem compelled to twist it up in their books, but this was a twist too far.

 It sounds like the perfect creepy haunted house novel. Readers are promised Shirley Jackson-type overtones. But with no likable characters, an unreliable narrator, and no motivation for the characters to do the things they do, the book was hugely disappointing, not just to me, but to two out of three professional critics, as well as a good number of Goodreads members.

The premise deals with a young, expectant couple wanting to take on rehabilitating a Victorian mansion in upstate New York because they have more money than sense so why not? Of course, the mansion has a dark, dark history, which may be the best part of the book, but then that crumbles as well as the dilapidated country lodge. The last chapter is the coup de grace.

Darcey Bell is a preschool teacher in Chicago. She was raised on a dairy farm in Iowa. Readers know she has the talent to rebound from this book.

My review will be posted on Goodreads starting January 20, 2022.

I would like to thank ­Atria Books and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC in return for an objective review.