Lilibet Bombshell's Reviews > Lock the Doors

Wow. I didn’t expect to have all the feelings I felt while feeling this book. While not the best YA psychological suspense-thriller I’ve read so far this year, it’s right up there near the top.

The most overwhelming feeling I had throughout this book was dread. For two thirds of this book I just felt a huge amount of dread: first on behalf of one character, and then on behalf of another. This book tells four different stories, in a way: two stories of families that were and two stories of families that are. You get to see both sides of the story, but no matter where you look, every facet of this story is so much more complex than what it looks like on the surface.

I feel like, if I had more time to sit on it, I could analyze this whole novel and write you an essay to articulate just how many layers there are to this book, but this is a review for a book release and not a book analysis. Maybe that’s another review for another time when I can read this book on my own time and annotate the whole thing. Trust me, though, the themes of love, loss, grief, mental illness, motherhood, sisterhood, families, domestic violence, and survival are more than enough to keep you involved, intrigued, and turning pages. It’s an absolutely chilling novel about how far some people will go to keep people safe and how far some other people will go to keep people happy. Which is the lesser of two evils? Read it and find out.

Thanks to NetGalley and Sourcebooks Fire for early access to this title in exchange for a fair and honest review.