Sweet Damage

December 15, 2014
For the soon-to-be-homeless Tim, the opportunity seems too good to be true: a spacious room in a lavish mansion for only $100 per week! The only hitch: he must perform the occasional errand for the house's owner, 20-year-old Anna, who is agoraphobic, and, thus, housebound. No worries there, and he is soon ensconced in his new digs. But then strange things begin to happen: he finds his room filled with spiders; strange figures begin appearing in the night; a message of death appears scrawled on a wall in paint the color of blood. And Anna? Well, beautiful, withdrawn Anna remains an enigma, but Tim finds himself drawn to her; however, is she the one responsible for the, well, incidents? The questions are ultimately resolved in a not terribly surprising denouement. Indeed, though billed as a psychological thriller, the book is long on the former and stingy on the latter, the thrills sometimes undone by a too-poky pace. That aside, there are some surprises, and the characters are appealingand, in one case, awfulenough to keep the pages turning. Give this one an E for effort.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)

July 1, 2014

Having won international fame with her novel Beautiful Malice, Australian author James returns with more over-the-top psychological suspense. Tim Ellison is thrilled to have found the ideal room to rent, though 20-year-old landlady Anna London is cold, distant, and fragile despite her youth. It's scary when things start going bump in the night, even scarier when Tim falls for Anna and her past comes into play.

Copyright 2014 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

March 5, 2013

Sweet Damage is the hotly anticipated new book from Rebecca James, whose debut YA thriller Beautiful Malice generated much hype around her reported million dollar advance and extensive foreign rights deals. Similarly pitched at the YA/adult crossover market, this psycho-mystery thriller throws us into another tangled web of seductively poisonous relationships—this time from a male perspective. When Tim answers an ad for a cheap, furnished room in Sydney, he can’t believe his luck. The only catch is his new flatmate Anna, an emotionally brittle girl suffering from extreme agoraphobia. Drawn within her dark and oppressive world, disturbing things begin to emerge, and Tim suspects Anna might be less harmless than she appears. Expectations for this northern-beaches gothic melodrama are undeniably high. While lacking the subtleties of its predecessor, this is a confident second novel from James, tapping into our deepest fears about trust and vulnerability, and showing off her forte for capturing the sinister manipulations between friends and lovers. James writes psychological horror for women well and her strong female characters—good, bad and mad—reflect this. While the curious flatness of this story’s protagonist somewhat dampens its emotional impact, like Beautiful Malice this book is so effortlessly readable you’re left wanting more.

Meredith Lewin is a Sydney-based freelance proofreader and reviewer who has worked for a children’s publisher