A Game For all the
Family. What on earth could that even mean, and what could that game possibly
entail? Your guess is as good as mine since Sophie Hannah, author of A Game For
all the Family, decided to keep that little tidbit to herself, if she even knew
it in the first place. Sure, she threw the line out there every once in a while,
as good authors do, but never actually tied it in with the story, so now the
title is just an awkward mouthful.
Justine is a wife,
a mother of one - Ellen - and a former television executive who has just fled
her career in favor of doing scandalously Nothing. After only having been in
their stately, historically archived home for a few months, Ellen begins to
withdraw and Justine starts receiving ominous-turn-threatening phone calls from
a woman she doesn't know or recognize, but who is sure that her and Justine
share a dangerous, life-threatening secret. This is Justine's game, though what
exactly that is, is never actually revealed.
The book starts off
sinister enough, with a very intriguing premise that I have never encountered
before. The extremely intricate story is very much plot-driven, a mystery
wrapped in a riddle where you're given all of the puzzle pieces but haven't the
faintest idea of how to put them all together, which usually makes for a very
good book. A Game For all the Family will keep you turning the pages, the
writing is sharp and clever and witty, it's Where'd You Go, Bernadette meets
the game of Clue. But while the premise is unique, it also becomes pretty far-fetched,
and the ending - the Big Reveal - manages to be both overly-dramatic - no,
unnecessarily dramatic - and a big let-down, and our heroin is the one who ends
up looking like the whack-job.
A Game For all the
Family. I still don't know what that means. ⭐⭐/5
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