Another powerful voice reaches the publishing market with a new proposal. Wit and talent are not the heritage of any author. And arrivals like Anna Snoekstra's become a remarkable literary event. In this case in the genre of mystery novels.
El only daughter book is Rebecca's story, seen as a mysterious journey to identity amid dark circumstances that will make us doubt everything that surrounds the girl.
We start from Rebecca Winter as a sixteen-year-old exemplary young woman: a hard-working woman, loved by her family and friends, with her little age-related unchecks but with nothing that makes us foreshadow what is to come (the only indication that makes us thinking about the dark future is the fact that we are reading a supposed mystery novel with that clear thriller aspect).
But there comes a time when everything changes. Evil is the tool that the author uses to guide the plot of the story. Something evil begins to surround Rebecca. His life begins to change from pink to gray suspicion until it drifts into a creepy black hole.
And Rebecca goes into that black hole. You as a reader do not know what has happened and you feel strongly trapped by the drastic change of scenery. When you find out, ten years have passed without a trace of Rebecca. The young woman disappeared and the novel has stopped in a limbo where you still need to know ...
When Rebecca returns ten years later, everyone struggles to relocate the scene of their lives prior to the disappearance. They assume that Rebecca is still that adolescent, even though she is already a mature woman trying to put herself in the shoes of the Rebecca she is not.
But the black hole is still there, the sum of circumstances and unknown aspects of the characters continues to hide, offering false clues, inviting us to think what it is not and anticipating the surprise.
The mix between the psychological novel and the thriller offers you the possibility of gathering contradictory sensations, of feeling lost in reading, of being surprised by the unexpected features of the characters.
Only daughter is a psychological novel with the best components of a thriller. Behind Rebecca there are broken dreams, violence, despair, and more than a certain feeling that a macabre character is hiding at the doors of the black hole, holding out his hand to "invite" you to enter.
You can now buy An Only Child, the latest book by Anna Snoekstra, here: