The Roanoke Girls

The Roanoke Girls by Amy Engel

Published by Hodder & Stoughton 

March 2017

Beautiful.
Rich.
Mysterious.

The Roanoke girls seem to have it all. But there's a dark truth about them which is never spoken. Every girl either runs away, or dies.
Lane is one of the lucky ones. When she was fifteen, over one long, hot summer at her grandparents' estate in rural Kansas, she found out what it really means to be a Roanoke girl. Lane ran, far and fast. Until eleven years later, when her cousin Allegra goes missing - and Lane has no choice but to go back.

She is a Roanoke girl.
Is she strong enough to escape a second time?

This book is a combination of The Virgin Suicides and Flowers in the Attic and I loved it.  I couldn't put it down and devoured it over a weekend.  Don't be fooled though, this is no comfy feel-good read, this is a book about a twisted family with a dark secret and it doesn't always make for pleasant reading.

Lane is a loner.  No family and not many friends, and there is good reason for this.  Lane prefers not to discuss her relatives, the Roanokes who live in a huge crumbling house in Kansas.  She left once, when she was in her teens, swearing to herself that she would never return there.  What she didn't expect was a phone call from her grandfather asking her to return because her cousin Allegra has vanished.  Would Lane return home to try to find her?

The story swings from past to present-day, with Lane's arrival at the house when she was a teenager and of her first meeting with her beautiful self-obsessed cousin Allegra.  The two girls could practically be twins, they both have the familial good looks that their mothers both possessed.  Unfortunately this beautiful group of girls have all met with tragic consequences over the years, and Lane and Allegra are the last two Roanoke girls.  Their grandmother Lillian is distant, but their grandfather, Yates is caring and attentive.  Both girls are allowed to do as they please, within reason, and life at the house seems idyllic.  Then Allegra disappears, and Lane is forced to return home, to the life she once tried to escape.

Nothing has changed, the same friends still hang out in the town and Lane reignites her friendship with mechanic Tommy, the local bad boy who she ran out on eleven years earlier.  With his help, can they find out what happened to Allegra, but can Lane keep the secrets she has buried so deep hidden, before Tommy once again gets too close?

Happy Reading

Miss Chapters x