Title: The Girl in the Wall
Author: Daphne Benedis- Grab
Pages: 256
Date Published: December 18, 2012
Publisher: Merit Press
Buy Links: Amazon.com, Kobo and Barnes and Noble
Rating: 4/5 Stars
Review: I received this book free from natgalley in exchange for an honest review.
The main reason that I had requested this book to read was because I fell in love with the cover. But once I read the summary I decided that the book would also be interesting lol. I would venture to say that this book reminded me of "The Panic Room", in some aspects. The Girl in the Wall was a very quick read because it was jam packed full of action and suspense. I enjoyed how this novel was told from two different perspectives, it helped the reader to get both sides of the story. Also I found it awesome how the suspense of who was behind the master plan was built- up to be one character but turns out to be someone that you would never have expected. The only issue that I had with this book was ( it might have just been my copy or the format) the numerous editing errors. I found that every sentence that started with a "th" word: these, the, this, etc... The "th" was missing. So try to get through a book when you have to fill in the blanks: "ese", "is", etc... So that was very annoying. Otherwise I liked this novel a lot.
I enjoyed reading about Sera and Ariel's past and present dramas. I can relate to having a fall-out with your best friend and later on reconciling. I'm glad that they could overcome their issues to help or try to help their friends and classmates. I wouldn't mind if their was another book so I could get more information on both girls before and then after this incident occurred. I want to see if they go back to being friends. Also there was a possible romance that budded, and I want to know if it will last. Or if it was something that happened because of a tragedy.
I would recommend this book to contemporary suspense lovers. And if you are a cover whore like me, this is a title that you need to add to your collection. I look forward to seeing if there will be another book, or just any other books that Daphne Benedis- Grab may decide to write in the future.
About this author (taken from http://www.daphnebg.com/about-me)
I grew up in a small town in New York State. As a kid I loved marathon phone calls with my friends, horseback riding, watching football with my dad and losing myself in a good book. I had dreams of being a football player and then a ballerina but my fear of getting tackled and my sensitive toes ultimately made it clear I wasn’t cut out for either.
By middle school my insatiable appetite for books and overly active imagination lead me to a love of writing and I decided I would be a writer when I grew up. I journaled daily and wrote long, dramatic sagas with my friend Lani in beat up notebooks that we would pass back and forth at lunch, each adding a new chapter at a time. The sagas, or more accurately soap operas, featured a mix of our celebrity and real life crushes and always had deeply poignant and satisfying endings.
But as I grew older other things took center stage and writing fell to the wayside. I went to a boarding high school where I got to hang out with my friends all night instead of just talking on the phone. I got sidetracked by a new found love of history when I went to college. Then I spent my twenties teaching English in China, building houses for Habitat for Humanity in Georgia, being a waitress in Boston and working at a tutoring center in San Francisco. I moved to New York City when I was twenty seven and knew I had found my home. Finding my way back to writing took a little longer.
I was in grad school studying religion when I randomly flipped through a book I’d liked and discovered that the author went to The New School. That’s when things began to come together. I got a catalog from The New School and when I saw that they had an Masters of Fine Arts concentration in writing for children, bells went off. I knew the stories I wanted to tell were for teens and middle grade readers, and I applied to The New School. I enrolled in their MFA program in 2006 and finally began to write again.
My first book, Alive and Well in Prague, New York, was also my thesis for the New School. It was inspired by my experiences when my dad was terminally ill with ALS and it came out in 2008. After Prague I did a couple of writing for hire books under pen names and then started a project purely for fun, a thriller about a party taken hostage. After many revisions that book became The Girl in the Wall and it is coming out in December 2012. I’m pretty excited about that.
Now I live in NYC with my husband, two kids and our doted upon cat. I spend many of my days writing, always shooting for endings that are deeply poignant and satisfying, because sometimes the things that you figure out when you’re young are the truest things there are.
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