[Review] Lenny Marks Gets Away with Murder - Kerryn Mayne

Summary: She bikes home from work at exactly 4pm each day, buys the same groceries for the same meals every week, and owns thirty-six copies of The Hobbit (currently arranged by height). The closest thing she has to a friendship is playing Scrabble against an imaginary Monica Gellar while watching Friends reruns.

And Lenny Marks is very, very good at not remembering what happened the day her mother and stepfather disappeared when she was still a child. The day a voice in the back of her mind started whispering, You did this.

Until a letter from the parole board arrives in the mail--and when her desperate attempts to ignore it fail, Lenny starts to unravel. As long-buried memories come to the surface, Lenny’s careful routines fall apart. For the first time, she finds herself forced to connect with the community around her, and unexpected new relationships begin to bloom. Lenny Marks may finally get a life–but what if her past catches up to her first?

Equal parts heartbreaking and heartwarming, Kerryn Mayne’s stunning debut is an irresistible novel about truth, secrets, vengeance, and family lost and found, with a heroine who's simply unforgettable. (Pub Date: Jul 09, 2024)

 

It's a charming novel that really grows on you as you go.

Lenny is a teacher and she likes her routine as much as she hates anything that takes her out of it, like the teacher who keeps stealing her tea. But she wouldn't openly accuse her without due proof. Her daily life is disturbed with the arrival of a letter informing her stepfather is to go on parole and they want to hear from her a victim. She prefers not to think about it and go on with her days, she's almost managed to become friends with one of the teachers. However, there's a part of herself that is telling her that it's time to face the facts of what happened the day her mother abandoned her.

3.5 rounded up to 4.

Quality is pretty high for a debut novel, but the beginning was also very confusing for me. Although the first pages already got me loving Lenny, probably to express to us the depth of her trauma, the narration got messy for a while. To be honest, the book almost lost me there. Fortunately, it recovers well as we understand where it wants to go.

Something else that bothered me, aside from the convoluted first quarter, was the tone. When you get a book that doesn't take itself seriously, you don't doubt when things go right all the time. When you get a more serious book, you will demand results to be less optimistic. This book, however, couldn't set the tone well, or at least it was how I felt, which broke credibility at times. For example, what are the chances of a dog that was so mistreated by his owner be the best boy? Not only he never bites anyone he shouldn't, but he knows where to do his business? He knows how to take walks? He's able to socialize with other dogs? Lenny must be the luckiest dog owner ever, because the only times her new dog does anything different, it is to help her with something. In a book with a less serious tone, that would probably not be a problem, it could even be a running joke, but it didn't feel like that was the writer's intention. The dog is only one example, but there are a lot of coincidences, fortunate twists going on that didn't agree well with the tone that was set. 

Despite all that, the story is beautiful. Heartbreaking at times, heartwarming at others, or even plainly funny. If this was a debut novel, I can't wait to read how Kerryn Mayne will progress.

Honest review based on an ARC provided by Netgalley. Many thanks to the publisher for this opportunity.

Rating: 4 out of 5.