This book totally gripped me from the first page to the last. The storyline is about as disturbing as you can get, but you have to keep reading, all the way to the twsted end. I could not put put it down and polished it off in two days! Highly recommended.

The Roanoke Girls

I really loved the synopsis for this book, it drew me in completely and wow, what a beautifully written piece of work.

I don’t think this is for the faint of heart; it’s gritty, dark and really quite disturbing. Just my kind of read!!

Truly though, this book will leave you breathless after an amazing roller coaster ride, it’s only a quick read but will make a serious impact on you. Five stars from me!

The Roanoke Girls sat on my bookshelf for ages. I’m embarrassed to say that I kept prioritising others books because I was pretty sure I’d enjoy The Roanoke Girls so I knew it was a good back up when I didn’t have anything else to read. As it turns out, as soon as I picked up the book I couldn’t put it down. I started it one morning before university and I’d finished it by that evening. It was just that good.

The story itself is so captivating but, without a doubt the best part of the book is Amy Engel’s writing. It’s raw, powerful and intelligent and definitely a contender for one of the best books I’ve read this year, if not for the last few years. The best way I can describe the book is that it’s dark. It covers a lot of difficult topics that I’m not going to go into much here because *spoilers* but the novel opens with a death and the macabre nature just keeps coming. In a similar way to The Vanishing of Audrey Wilde which I reviewed a few months ago, the novel sizzled with a dusky Summer feel which I loved and helped me picture the Roanoke estate so much better. The small town vibe mixed with the creepy undertones which ran through the book really created an unsettling atmosphere that worked so well with the plot progression.

The Roanoke Girls is so heart-wrenchingly sombre and yet it dazzles with a youthful feel, especially in the present day chapters where Lane meets with her old friends. The book questions the meaning of family, of hometown ties and sisterhood and will leave you with so many questions that you’ll want to go right back to the start and read again for any clues.

If you only read one book this year, The Roanoke Girls should be it.

I received a copy from Netgalley.

I snagged a copy of this one when it was a read it now for the first 100 members. It promised some of my favourite tropes in novels – rich family, idyllic setting, dark twisty secrets. This book has one of those annoying boats in the title tag line saying the most dark twisty shocking plot! However, this one did deliver on the dark twist.

My biggest issue with this (side from the really nauseating disturbingness of the plot twists) is that it was predictable. I’d guessed the Roanoke family secrets almost immediately. Anyone who’s ever seen Law and Order: Special Victims Unit could probably guess what’s going on here. I also guessed correctly who the killer was.

That being said, there was something utterly compelling about the story telling. I really liked Lane, the main character. Told in a then and now format, what happened when Lane was a teenager and went to live with the Roanokes after her mother committed suicide. Her grandparents and her cousin the same age as her Allegra. And the now chapters of what happens when Lane goes back as an adult after Allegra disappears.

Lane was by no mean a good, nice person. Not as a teen, nor as an adult. She was a flat out bitch, she was blunt and cold and didn’t even bother to hide the fact that sometimes it was easier to be cruel than to be kind. Despite her personality flaws, she made a very interesting character, and I kind of loved her. While her cousin Allegra was your typical spoilt rich girl. She could manipulate people easily, and wrap boys around her finger. She could convince you to do anything, regardless of consequences. She had a certain charisma about herself, despite the fact Allegra could be stroppy selfish and childish. She tells Lane about the sordid history of the Roanoke girls before them. All the girls in their family line - including both their mothers - all got pregnant young and either ran away or committed suicide.

The Roanoke household is a big mansion and a farm run by its patriarch Yates Roanoke Lane and Allegra’s grandfather. He has an old world charm about him. Firm when needed without being overbearing, yet very witty, charming and always with a kind word and encouragement, while grandma is your typical blue blood grandma. Beautiful but cold and kind of passive.

In the summer in their teens Lane learns about farm life and meets Allegra’s current boyfriend Tommy, and his best friend Cooper. Tommy is your average small town good boy from a nice family while Cooper is the good looking dude with the shady family and bad history, he and Lane hit it off immediately and begin a relationship, more hooking up when they can than anything else.

When Lane comes back to town as an adult she reconnects with Tommy, now married and a police office and Cooper, now a mechanic. The Roanoke house is still the same as it was when Lane ran away in her teens. With one exception. Allegra is gone. Lane searches for answers to what happened to her. Flipping back and forth between what happened that summer when she arrived and her investigation on return.

Also flittered into the novel is chapters on various Roanoke women and what happened to them either when they ran or when they died.

The writing is top notch, even though none of the characters are particularly likeable. The story telling makes you want to know what’s going on, what happened back in that summer, why did Lane run away, what did she learn about the Roanoke secrets. And when she comes back what happened to Allegra. Did she finally leave – was she murdered? What happened? It’s twisty and very disturbing in parts. The answers to the Roanoke secrets are actually in the text if you look between the lines. And it is sick. It’s stomach wrenching and utterly utterly wrong in very way possible.

It’s a pretty fucked up book but it’s excellently written.

Thank you to Netgalley and Hodder and Stoughton for the review copy.

The subject matter made this book disturbing but never seedy. The characters all have flawed characters and it is difficult to warm to them or feel any affection or sympathy. I was constantly fearing for the main character Lane and this kept me gripped throughout the book.

Amazingly written. Disturbing, oh so disturbing for amazingly written. I loved it.

I've been longing to read this book for a while now, having heard so much hype about it. Frankly I'm always intrigued when I hear a lot about a book from lots of different sources, so I was keen to track a copy down and when I downloaded it onto my Kindle last week I couldn't wait to start it.

I'll start with a trigger warning: I think it's fairly obvious, but whilst it doesn't go into any graphic detail, this book is centred on sexual abuse.

Lane is our central character. Finding herself at Roanoke to live with her grandparents after her mother's suicide, she spends a summer with her grandparents and her cousin, Allegra. Allegra fills her in on the family history when she arrives: "Roanoke girls either run or die". And we discover that this family seems to have had more than it's fair share of tragedy.

The summer is hot and the girls bond over local boys and their time helping out their grandparents on the farm. There is a creepy undertone to everything and the central theme is alluded to but never explicitly uncovered.

We follow Lane's story as she is called back to Roanoke eleven years after that summer by her grandfather when her Allegra goes missing in strange circumstances.

The narrative splits between THEN and NOW and is peppered with accounts from some of the other past Roanoke Girls, too. Whilst I know this is a fairly standard method of eking out critical information, it all seems to work nicely and flows together to keep the reader interested.

When it came to the big "reveal", I have to say I was a little disappointed. There's no real twist, and as I say, the book had really been alluding to the truth all the way through. My suspicions were confirmed about the hideousness of the grandmother character, but not of the truth came as a surprise, so things felt a little...flat in the last couple of chapters. That said, I was fairly hooked and read the book in just a couple of hours, so it was well-written in that respect and I don't know how else it really could have ended, so there you are.

Goodreads: The Roanoke Girls.
Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
Amazon: UK|US
Synopsis: Roanoke girls never last long around here. In the end, we either run or we die.

After her mother's suicide, fifteen year-old Lane Roanoke came to live with her grandparents and fireball cousin, Allegra, on their vast estate in rural Kansas. Lane knew little of her mother's mysterious family, but she quickly embraced life as one of the rich and beautiful Roanoke girls. But when she discovered the dark truth at the heart of the family, she ran fast and far away.

Eleven years later, Lane is adrift in Los Angeles when her grandfather calls to tell her Allegra has gone missing. Did she run too? Or something worse? Unable to resist his pleas, Lane returns to help search, and to ease her guilt at having left Allegra behind. Her homecoming may mean a second chance with the boyfriend whose heart she broke that long ago summer. But it also means facing the devastating secret that made her flee, one she may not be strong enough to run from again.

As it weaves between Lane's first Roanoke summer and her return, The Roanoke Girls shocks and tantalizes, twisting its way through revelation after mesmerizing revelation, exploring the secrets families keep and the fierce and terrible love that both binds them together and rips them apart.

Review: I received this book from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review, and I was really happy that I'd managed to snag it. I want to preface this review with a few trigger warnings for the book, it contains suicide, sexual abuse, child abuse, and toxic relationships. This book is dark, twisted and angry, so it won't be for everyone but I did end up enjoying it.

For me this book was slow to get going, all of the characters were unlikable and I couldn't seem to get invested. I hated Allegra much like most of the characters in the book, and so I didn't really care whether they found her or not; she was mean and vindictive, and Lane had become the same over the past eleven years, if it wasn't for the mystery of Roanoke then I think this book would have ended up as a DNF for me.

The book definitely grew on me though as it pieced together Lane's experiences at Roanoke, and how they had shaped her into the women she is in the present. It's heartbreaking watching the book flit from the past to the present, as you finally realise why the Roanoke Girls never last long. It's an unforgiving story and as I read I grew more sympathetic towards Lane's character, and even towards Allegra who I'd hated for the first five chapters.

I especially loved the changing timelines and perspectives! The novel gave us a glimpse into the lives of every Roanoke girl that had come before Lane, and it kept me reading I wanted too know how this had gone on so long; how had no one realised and protected these girls, it was amazing how well Amy Engel kept me engaged despite it being easy to figure out the big secret early on.

I loved  the second half of this book, once I was into this thriller I just couldn't put it down. It's dark, creepy, and thoroughly enjoyable, if you can make it past the first few chapters it's a fantastic read.

Recommend:  If you love dark and twisted thrillers then this is definitely a damn good one!

Stars  ★★★★

I enjoyed reading this book, although I found it a bit too slow in places; it would have been easy to put down and not pick up again, which would have been a shame, as I enjoyed the ending.

The big secret was quite easy to spot early on, so the reveal did not come as too much of a shock - although I was wrong with how I expected the ending to go.

I enjoyed reading the snapshots of the other members of the family, would have been nice to see more of this.

Overall, a good book, and I'll keep an eye out for others by the same author.

A thoroughly gripping novel.
Seedy, beautiful, dangerous, exciting, mysterious and sick. All good definitions for what happens inside.
The Roanoke girls are rich and beautiful. They are also either dead or have disappeared.
Why? The answer can be found at Roanoke House. The Grandfather and Grandmother have deep secrets which are now threatened by the existence of the most current Roanoke Girl: Lane.

Lane is one of the lucky ones. When she was fifteen she found out what it really means to be a Roanoke girl and so she escaped. But now she is forced to return and unravel what's happened to her cousin and the other girls who once lived there.
Very gripping novel- dark undertones and a real page turner!

The Roanoke Girls is a deeply insidious story told from the perspective of Lane Roanoke, a girl who had grown up with an emotionally abusive mother. When Lane’s mother kills herself Lane is sent to live with her grandparents at Roanoke (the house is named after the family). The book sets us on a journey via two different time frames, the first “Then” gives us the story of Lane’s first summer at Roanoke and how she gets to know the family she didn’t know existed. “Then” should be one of those happy stories of new friends, sun tans and first boyfriends, but there is always something slightly off about this idyll.

The second part of the story is told in the “Now”, not that the parts come one after the other, rather that they twist around each other, giving us more information about events we see in the past and how that ties to Lane’s present-day situation. Both stories tell the tale of how Lane returns to Roanoke, the first as mentioned in the “Then” where she feels like she may finally have a place to call home, in a great monstrosity of a house, which seems to have smashed different kinds of buildings into each other, with her new family comprised of her Grandfather, Yates, who works on the farm to keep himself busy, as the Roanoke’s are rich; her Grandmother, Lillian, who from the start is cold and distant and finally her cousin Allegra, who could almost be Lane’s twin, who, from first appearances seems to live just to enjoy herself.

The second time Lane returns to Roanoke, is when she receives a call from Yates, telling her that Allegra has gone missing and asking her to come home. We don’t know why Lane doesn’t want to return to Roanoke, but she does, as she feels that she owes this to Allegra after leaving her there over ten years ago. What she finds is a house that feels slightly less lived in, as if the light has gone out of it. There is a gaping hole where Allegra should be. Lane gets to see how life has moved on for the people she left behind, as she slowly catches up with her past. It slowly dawns on Lane that she has to be the one who finds out the truth about what happened to Allegra and why she disappeared.

The Roanoke Girls is a grim story that shows how much damage can be done in one family, that is slowly decaying on the inside. Where one man doesn’t even see that he is hurting those he says he loves and no one talks about the family’s dark secret. There is a lot of victim blaming throughout the story, mostly from the victims themselves, not realising that what happened to them wasn’t their fault. It is terrible how one action repeats itself over and over again, until the town, blind to the true events happening at Roanoke, know one thing, a Roanoke girl, either runs away or dies young!

I have never read this author and although the subject matter is difficult to read at times it is very well written. You immediately connect with the main character as she returns to her family home. The only thing that was a little confusing to me was the family tree/history but it is laid out for you in the beginning of the book and actually isn't imperative that you know it super well. You'll get the general idea I assure you!
I would definitely recommend this book and look forward to the next novel the author writes.

Incest will never be an easy subject matter and therefore this wasn’t an easy read. I have to admit as uncomfortable as it was to readI couldn’t put the book down. I can really see it being adapted into a mini series or film. 5💫

Dark and unsettling, the plight of Amy Engel’s Roanoke Girls is as compelling as it is alarming. Although we guess the form of the abuse and the identity of the perpetrator early on, Engel’s skilful ability to ensnare the reader is deft, creating a late night page turning read. Lane Roanoke’s return to the family home, determined to uncover the fate of her missing cousin, Allegra, contains all the ingredients of the perfect Gothic novel – death, family secrets, twisted romance, the sprawling brooding farmhouse set in the wilds of rural Kansas. One small difficulty I had with the novel was keeping track of the cast of Roanoke girls, particularly those who suffer first. However that same cast, although not necessarily easy to like, are drawn so believably, the reader feels each horrifying tug and as the girls’ confused feelings are jerked and pushed in painful ways. A thought provoking read on the impact of abuse throughout generations and the potentially corrosive nature of the desire to belong.

A very good read hard to put down. The subject matter was quite difficult but I felt dealt with
Well, slightly different from my normal read, but highly recommended

Reading this book was like sitting down in front of Dallas, it had drama and felt like watching a soap opera!!!!! It centres around the world of a family.....and what happens....Roanoke girls have drama and this book has it in spades, we hear the different stories and you want to devour it up whole! It was compared to Virginia Andrews flowers in the attic, and there are similarities but this is an easier read and less dark! Loved it

Thank you to NG for a free copy of this book.

Roanoke girls never last long around here. In the end, we either run or we die.

After her mother's suicide, fifteen year-old Lane Roanoke came to live with her grandparents and fireball cousin, Allegra, on their vast estate in rural Kansas. Lane knew little of her mother's mysterious family, but she quickly embraced life as one of the rich and beautiful Roanoke girls. But when she discovered the dark truth at the heart of the family, she ran fast and far away.

Eleven years later, Lane is adrift in Los Angeles when her grandfather calls to tell her Allegra has gone missing. Did she run too? Or something worse? Unable to resist his pleas, Lane returns to help search, and to ease her guilt at having left Allegra behind. Her homecoming may mean a second chance with the boyfriend whose heart she broke that long ago summer. But it also means facing the devastating secret that made her flee, one she may not be strong enough to run from again.

As it weaves between Lane's first Roanoke summer and her return, The Roanoke Girls shocks and tantalizes, twisting its way through revelation after mesmerizing revelation, exploring the secrets families keep and the fierce and terrible love that both binds them together and rips them apart.

This is a powerfully written book and it is hard to read in places given the subject matter of intra-familial child abuse. It is, however, compelling and difficult to put down. I loved Lane as the lead character; slightly unconventional and not your average female heroine, and Engel shows brilliantly that you don't have to be a carbon copy girl to be a role model - perhaps not in all of Lane's life and choices, but in the way she overcomes and survives. Each new revelation shocks and it's hard to predict how it will all turn out in the end. I'm sure not for all, but I liked the ending; it felt right after everything that had happened before.

Engel isn't someone I have read before but I will certainly look out for future books.

A well written and compelling read but a difficult and unpleasant subject matter.

I can't say I enjoyed reading this book as the subject matter was disturbing to read but something about it captivated my interest and kept me reading to the end. It has a sinister undercurrent throughout the book. A haunting tale of dark family secrets.

An uncomfortable novel which draws you in and keeps you guessing.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read this book in exchange for an honest review.

Wow this certainly had my gripped from start to finish ,sensitive subject matter but in my opinion if you we don’t read about how will we know. Highly recommended

A gripping story that keeps you guessing right to the end. Highly recommended.