Cracking book full of survival suspense and mystery throughout with a final few twists that shock as well as surprise. I couldn't put t his one down.

Urghhhhhhhhh this was just the book I was looking for at this time. I want to clarify that is a 'yes. perfect. excellent. I need more like this' kind of urgh, not the bad kind. Women being evil, fake identities, secret sister codes, unreliable narrators, this book had everything. It was just the right amount of dark, just the right amount of deception and maneuvering, and while I wasn't totally surprised, it's often not about the reveal, but the motive, the reasoning, the omg that's f***ed up moment. I really, REALLY, enjoyed this read, I was gripped all the way through, and I'm excited to check out what else Clark-Platts has written.

Laurel and Primrose are known as The Flower Girls. One was convicted of murder nineteen years ago and the other a new identity. Now another child has gone missing and The Flower Girls hit the headlines all over again.

I found this a very slow read, I was waiting for something to happen but I’m not sure what. The characters were hard for me to connect with and by the end I didn’t care who had done what!

Thank you to Netgalley for my advanced copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

WOW I’m actually still reeling/thinking about this book, I was completely gripped from the first page. Laurel and Primrose (Rosie) were dubbed the Flower Girls by the press after they lured and murdered in the most horrific way, 2 year old Kirstie Swann. As Rosie was only 6 years old, she was deemed incapable of standing trial given her age, Laurel who was 10 was convicted and sent to a young offenders institute and then to prison once she turned 18 whilst Rosie and her parents were given new identities and a new start.

Roll on 19 years later and a 5 year old girl goes missing from a coastal hotel on the Devon Cliffs, as the roads have been closed due to a snow storm, obviously it’s the guests/staff who are accused. When it gets out that Hazel Archer a guest in the hotel is in fact one and the same as Primrose Bowman, one half of The Flower Girls, she claims she has nothing to do with the missing girl but with her history, can she be trusted to be telling the truth?

The Flower Girls hit the headlines once again and now that they know the identity of Rosie Bowman, she is being hounded. She has no memory of what happened the day Kirstie Swann was murdered she has blocked it out.

I can’t say much more for fear of ruining it for others, but to tell you it’s a jaw dropping, head spinning, horrifying, chilling, twisty read and I highly recommend it.

Many thanks to Netgalley, Bloombury Publishing Plc and Raven Books for an advanced copy in exchange for my honest opinion.

It's taken me a long time to think about this book and how I want to review it. I have to say that although the writing is exquisite and the storyline slowly built but engrossing, I really didn't like it and it left me feeling very uncomfortable. That doesn't normally bother me but The Flower Girls just felt a little bit too close to recent events for comfort for me. I wanted to give up around 15% but felt invested enough in the plot to keep going to the end to find out if my first instincts were correct (which they were!) but the ending especially really did make me feel quite queasy. Not for me I'm afraid.

Thought provoking! A different kind of murder mystery. Rosie and her sister Laurel were accused of killing a toddler when they were 6 and 10 respectively. Laurel is convicted and incarcerated for the next 18 years. Rosie was too young to testify and "escaped" but had to change her name and felt forever at risk. A tragedy occurs and Rosie's identity is revealed bringing back notoriety and all sorts of unwanted memories.
The book is an interesting angle of the impact on a killers family. But it is also a murder mystery, to understand what really happened "that day" and on its present day parallel. As a mother, I found the story disturbing and I'm not sure I enjoyed it. But I cant deny its twists and turns and dive in psychology were interesting and had me thinking about the book, and its ending, long after I had finished the last page.

Laurel and Primrose are The Flower Girls. One was convicted of murder, the other given a new identity. Now nineteen years later another child has gone missing. This book had me hooked from the first page. The plot flows well with just the right amount of characters. Alice Clark-Platts tells a brilliantly chilling tale and I can highly recommend this book. Thank you to NetGalley, Bloomsbury Publishing and the author for the chance to review.

The Flower Girls
Alice Clark-Platts
Raven Books

Firstly, I’d like to thank Raven Books for the ARC of this novel. I’d like to thank NetGalley for facilitating, and also Alice Clark-Platts for an interesting read!

It has taken me almost 2 weeks to write this review because I wanted to find a way to be fair to the author but I also wanted to be honest about my feelings towards The Flower Girls, and immediately after reading I had such intense feelings about this book that I couldn’t bear to write about it. Two weeks later and I’m finally in a place where I feel able to discuss it but forgive me if this isn’t the best review I’ve written - I really just want it out on the page so that I can put it from my mind.

Now usually I will not disclose any information about the book NOT in the synopsis so that I don’t ruin the book for anyone - and also because I think that’s terribly unfair to the authors who put so much time into their novels. HOWEVER... on this occasion there is one fact that I will disclose because I think it is important to know before you begin this book. The murder that is mentioned in the synopsis is the brutal torture & murder of a toddler. An innocent baby. And I’m telling you this because had this been made clear in the synopsis I would have kept away from the book. I know I’m not alone in this, as a mother of a baby and a toddler I CANNOT read or hear of any crimes against children their age without my head going mad and imagining them in that scenario. It is torture because it replays over and over in my head in as much detail as I am given. I hear what my girls would have said, how they would have cried, what their faces would have looked like and I can’t stop the thoughts from playing. I was told it was some form of post-partum anxiety but I know from speaking to other mothers that they also experience the same thing as I do - it seems fairly common. So if you are like me, do not go near this book. Once I’d started I couldn’t stop and it was very painful to read.

This book closely resembles another crime that I’m certain everyone will remember. As such it easily blurs the lines between fact and fiction and therefore creates a deeper emotional response when reading.

The storyline was actually well thought out -although I had the characters figured out quite early on into the book. That’s not to say that they were not complex because they very much were, but their true selves were easy enough to figure out as the story progressed.

Because of the above issues with the subject matter I found it incredibly hard to connect in any way with the characters because I spent most of my time wishing the book were over and holding everyone within it at arms length.

I am giving this 3 stars because I’m certain that it was written well, and that for some people this will be an incredible page turner, but for me - I didn’t want to read this book, and had I known what it was really about I wouldn’t have.

A truly suspenseful read. Two sisters Primrose and Laurel take a small child from the playground. Hours latwer the child is found dead. Nineteen years on one sister in prison the other living her shiny new life with a new identity. While away on a break with her partner 'Hazel' is recognised as one of the flower girls after a child goes missing. The story twists and turns through the sisters lives portraying both favouritism and fear.
This book is both riveting and chilling. It is hard to put down once started and is a book I would definitely recommend to anyonwe who enjoys a good psycholoical thriller.

I really enjoyed this story. It has an unsettling premise as it is about the murder of a small child by two other children. However I was compelled to read it and within the first few pages I was hooked. My suspicions deveoped through the story but I was in no hurry to find out if I was right, the book was too gripping. I certainly didn't expect the final twist. So well written, a really fascinating read.

THE FLOWER GIRLS by Alice Clark-Platts is a sharp and well-paced thriller built upon the chilling incident of a child murder: a murder not just OF a child, but one committed BY a child. Two sisters were there when the baby died; neither of them ever described what happened, and one went to prison while the other gained a new identity and a life marred by horror. So what happened next, and why has another child disappeared?

The start of this book is beautifully atmospheric, set at a hotel on a snowy clifftop in the midst of a New Year celebration. During these first few chapters - swirled with high emotion and drama - I couldn't help thinking that this was what I would be reading if Daphne du Maurier had written a novel based on the Cluedo board game. It honestly kept me up at night, I was enjoying it so much.

The book moves on past the inciting incident at the clifftop hotel and into the murky developments of the weeks and months to follow. What really happened? Who was to blame? These answers are dangled until the very last, with many characters' motives and actions remaining suspicious throughout. Interspersed with the developments are small, delicate flashbacks to the original child murder - chillingly brutal and unnerving and making you rethink your theories right up to the last page.

This was a great book, nicely paced and with a stunning sense of atmosphere and creepiness. The author has a really lovely turn of phrase - there were many instances where I thought to myself, "Wow - THAT line..." and breathed a blissful sigh.

Thank you, NetGalley, for the opportunity to read this exciting book. I'm looking forward to reading more of Alice Clark-Platts' work!

Read this in a few hours whilst in bed with some virus 🦠 which is an interesting analogy for this book.
It’s not a new concept (as others have pointed out) but it does bring it up to date with the Flower Girls now all grown up. Like a virus, this book got its claws into me and slowly got hold of me! I didn’t like it at first but as the momentum builds, it really hooked me in.
A cast of seemly unpleasant characters with not much going for them, even the worthiest characters seemed flawed and full of bile.

It’s the most horrendous thing that anyone can imagine yet this author brought it to life in a way that made it more palatable to read. By the end of the book you have an understanding of the motivations of the main characters... I felt that it was all a little rushed and could have been developed to have more of a crescendo with a longer more expansive ending.

That said, it was an “easy”, interesting read that was light on gruesome details (so much the better, in my opinion) and longer on narrative. There’s a bit too much telling and less for the reader to work out, but all in all, it’s an interesting and compelling read.
4*

My advance copy was not formatted properly but this didn’t detract from the book...

Lauren, 10, and Rosie, 6, are deemed by the courts to be complicit in the abduction, torture and murder of a toddler. Lauren is sentenced to imprisonment until at least the age of review at 18 but Rosie is too young to be felt culpable and is given a new identify … so we meet her again as a free woman, now ‘Hazel’, in her 20s at a seaside hotel with her boyfriend Jonny – the only person to whom she has ever admitted her real identity. Both Rosie/Hazel and Lauren are estranged from their family and Lauren in particular is the subject of a bitter hate campaign from the aunt of the murdered child, who is determined that she remain in prison after she passes 18.

The story takes on a new urgency when a little girl goes missing from the hotel where Hazel is staying, and the inevitable revelations of her real identity come to light. Could she be repeating the crime she got away with at the age of 6? The question that then hovers over the whole book is whether Hazel could be involved in this new abduction and also how involved she was back then, as a 6-year-old.

The story flits back and forth between 1997 when the ‘flower girls’ were children and the modern day, as we see Hazel’s life begin to unravel and we also see the traumatic surroundings of Lauren’s life in prison, a little more of each scene being revealed each time we come back to it.

The author does a pretty good job of maintaining suspense. Unusually for me, I ‘guessed it/got it’ pretty early on but that didn’t particularly spoil it for me. What did, though, was a somewhat superficial rendering of the characters in terms of their personalities and motivations. The character I connected with most was Lauren, in prison, as I found myself feeling some sorrow and sympathy for her situation, but I could not find much sympathy for or empathy with any of the other characters. Even allowing for expected grief and bitterness, the families of victims and perpetrators alike had few or no redeeming features to allow us to sympathise with them or even like them just a little bit. Even the police involvement was dissatisfying and seemed almost an added afterthought to the plot, with no follow-through towards the end. The quite basic plot had a wee twist at the end but even that final revelation was dealt with swiftly and without particular explanation, which left me not hungering for more but rather feeling plain dissatisfied.

So, for me, not a real winner. I did quite enjoy the read (if that’s the right word for a book with such a serious theme) but I didn’t find myself rushing to pick it up and keep reading.

The Flower Girls took me a few chapters to get fully into but then I couldn't put it down. I feel opinions could be divided because of the subject matter and frequent mentions of famous child murderers but I loved this book. I'll be keeping an eye out for other books by Alice as this was so good!

I have to say that I did not really enjoy this book, and I almost gave up on it around a third of the way in. I found it very slow and plodding, with not a lot happening, but I persevered.
The subject matter is disturbing and chilling, dealing with the long- ago murder of a tiny child, and the present day disappearance of a toddler. I had a real problem with the ploy of story references to previous child abductions and murder which have happened in real life, and which still remain in many readers memories, I found this unnecessary and distasteful, and felt that it was exploitative of real life tragedies, for the sake of a story.
The narrative picked up in the last third of the book, but it was evident how the story would conclude.
I was not convinced by the characters, some of whom were one - dimensional. There was very little depth to the main characters, I did not get a real sense of them at all, I’m sorry to say.
My thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for my advance copy of the book.

This book is definitely one not to miss. Superb - worth much more than 5 stars. Momentum is maintained throughout and you never have to wade through pages of descriptive text. The story embraces 2 time periods - 1997 when a small child is murdered and the Flower Girls are responsible. Very clear except you do not know until the last few pages whether the sister who is in prison is guilty or innocent. One or two clues on the way through the book but never enough for you to be certain. The second period is 20 years later when a young girl disappears from a Devon hotel on New Years Eve. You are not certain for the first third of the book whether or not the girl is alive or dead or whether it is directly linked to the murder 20 years previous.. A bit of Agatha Christie in here but again you try to work out what happened and it is only at the very end that you know who is to blame but (unless I missed it) not why. Still, this book is a great read.

The problem with this grim tale is that I felt it skirted too close to the notoriety of famous child victim cases which are too recent in public memory to make me feel comfortable about whether I was OK with the connections being used in a novel (the cases of the Moors murders, Jamie Bulger, Madeleine McCann, the Soham murders and more are referenced) I think I'd have preferrred to make my own links rather than worry that it was a bit exploitative. It does deal with the complex nature of media intrusion around violent crimes affecting children and the often unhinged public scrutiny of those involved, even peripherally. I finished it and was often quite engaged, but overall it left me feeling a bit itchy, as if I was somehow complicit in the very thing I've just mentioned.

With thanks to Netgalley and the publishers for the book in exchange for an honest review.
I thought this book was amazingly well written and once I started I found it hard to stop reading the book. It isn’t an easy subject to write about, children who kill, but it was really well thought out and not sensationalised.
It also showed the effect of the murder of a child, not only on the immediate family but also on the wider family. In the child’s family the parents and the aunt kept up their vigil for nearly 20 years to ensure that Laurel never was released. In the Flower Girls family , the parents and Rosie never once visited Laurel and moved away and changed their names. The uncle who was a lawyer, Toby was the only family member who not only represented Laurel until his imminent death from cancer but continued to act on her behalf and by doing so his parents the Flower Girls grandparents never spoke to him again.
It was a mesmerising story and in parts quite chilling!!
Highly recommended.

Two young sisters playing games. One dead baby. One sister convicted and the other goes free.
18 years later a child goes missing.
Memories are revisited and lives are changed.
This will keep you guessing to the end and then have a final surprise.

Thanks Netgalley and the Publisher. I had been looking forward to reviewing this book and I am so glad that I did, this was a compelling and intense read and also in parts very disturbing. 4 stars