Sweet Damage (Rebecca James, A&U)

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 

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Category: Reviews