Thursday 4 January 2018

Isabella's Reading Corner: The Chalk Man



The Chalk Man
Author: C.J. Tudor
Publication Date: January 9th 2018
Publisher: Crown




From the opening lines of The Chalk Man I was transfixed. This book took hold of me and refused to let go. I still have the shivers after finishing it!

As pre-teens Eddie Adams and his friends, Fat Gav, Metal Mickey, Hoppo and Nicky live a fairly idyllic life in a small English village. One Saturday afternoon they meet at the local fairground and a startling incident that occurs there creates a foreshadowing of the events to come. Soon after they are inspired to begin leaving coded messages to each other in the form of a stick man. Each member of the group is assigned a specific colour of chalk, so it's clear who left the code. However, their simple game has far reaching consequences and one of the messages leads them down a path of horror none of them expected.

Eddie narrates this fantastic story, which alternates between two time periods, 1986 and 2016. The characters are all extremely well-developed and exceptionally portrayed with intensely believable actions and interactions. I felt that I was able to clearly understand their motivations, especially the narrator.

This is a novel to immerse yourself in, know as little as possible before starting and read without interruption. Just when I found myself seduced by the nostalgic, dreamy atmosphere, I was jolted straight out of my lull with another surprise. Tudor doesn't hold back with the shocks. She supplies enough twists to keep even the most astute suspense thriller reader satisfied. The Chalk Man is beautiful, haunting and engrossing.  An absolutely stunning debut.

Thank you to Nick at Penguin Random House Canada for the ARC provided for review.




From the publisher:
A riveting and relentlessly compelling psychological suspense debut that weaves a mystery about a childhood game gone dangerously awry, and will keep readers guessing right up to the shocking ending

In 1986, Eddie and his friends are just kids on the verge of adolescence. They spend their days biking around their sleepy English village and looking for any taste of excitement they can get. The chalk men are their secret code: little chalk stick figures they leave for one another as messages only they can understand. But then a mysterious chalk man leads them right to a dismembered body, and nothing is ever the same.
     In 2016, Eddie is fully grown, and thinks he's put his past behind him. But then he gets a letter in the mail, containing a single chalk stick figure. When it turns out that his friends got the same message, they think it could be a prank . . . until one of them turns up dead.
     That's when Eddie realizes that saving himself means finally figuring out what really happened all those years ago.
Expertly alternating between flashbacks and the present day, The Chalk Man is the very best kind of suspense novel, one where every character is wonderfully fleshed out and compelling, where every mystery has a satisfying payoff, and where the twists will shock even the savviest reader.


You can read my original Isabella's Reading Corner post on The Chalk Man here.


No comments:

Post a Comment