4.25 stars

At first I would like to thank Netgalley and Crooked Lane Books for allowing me to read an advanced copy of this novel in exchange for an honest review.

Young Mother Lauren Tranter has just given birth to two perfect twin boys Morgan and Riley. She wants to be thrilled, overjoyed by having given birth to these beautiful boys but she is really just overwhelmed, exhausted and over all miserable. One night in the hospital Lauren Lauren catches a woman trying to exchange her own children with Lauren's. "It's only fair" she says. Lauren immediately calls 999 and though the hospital reports Lauren is having metal issue. However, Detective Harper believes that there is something wrong going on and that Lauren is not crazy.

One month later Lauren's babies disappear and when they are recovered Lauren denies that they are her sons. They may look like them but they are not her baby boys.

Lauren embarks on a journey to find her real sons and she faces some of the most frightening things you can imagine.

I wanted this to be a 5 star book but in the end it was a respectable 4.25 for me. This was a spooky,fun and creepy novel. I am not sure if this is really a full on mystery. It really reads as a horror, fairy tale with a mystery attached.

Well written with strong female characters, this is a novel that will certainly lure you in and keep you interested but it just felt like it was missing something for me.

I’m definitely loosing sleep over this one. What an extremely creepy and riveting tale. Little Darlings by Melanie Golding made my skin crawl with its captivating and creative storyline that reminded me of Grimms Fairy Tales.

This is inspired by the Welsh fairy tale A Brewery of Eggshells, about a woman with newborn twins who are swapped with changelings. Lauren Tranter has given birth to two twin boys who promptly become her entire world. A disarrayed woman shows up to the maternity ward and threatens to swap her two twins with Lauren’s twins, she then turns into a protective mother — willing to do anything to save her babies.

Although the doctors, police and even her husband keep telling her she is seeing things, she knows the truth — the woman was real. When her twins go missing one day, a frantic search begins but they’re both found, ostensibly unharmed. Lauren, however, knows the true — these are not her twin babies.

Those around her dismiss her, saying she is mentally ill. All except one — Detective Sergeant Joanna Harper. For her own reasons, the detective believes Lauren. Harper opens her own investigation against her superior’s wishes and looks into what really happened to Lauren and her two babies.

What a bloody haunting tale! I truly enjoyed Melanie Golding’s style of writing and how certain parts left me shocked. While the story mirrored fairy tales and folklore — it had a darker and more sinister back story. For those following along on my blog, you’ll know I’m EXTREMELY single, so I don’s have children. I couldn’t relate to the postpartum depression or the after affects of having a child/children. But I can say, reading other reviews, many women who read this book seriously relate to this story and the struggles faced after having a baby/babies.

What really kept me on the edge of my seat was this tug of war I had over whether Lauren was suffering from postpartum depression or thinking that her babies were really taken and switched. You really have to question if Lauren is losing her mind and will anyone believer her? Brava to Melanie Golding’s writing! She certainly has a new avid follower of her work over here!

Little Darlings by Melanie Golding is a dark, creepy psychological thriller that left me terrified at the prospect of motherhood and marriage. A complete whiplash from my romance novels that I’ve been reading lately! Let’s just say this book certainly should be on your top 2019 reads for mystery and thrillers! This book will be published April 30.

Thank you to NetGalley and Crooked Lane Books for providing me with a digital ARC in exchange for my honest review.

I did not enjoy this book. I lost interest and patience with it. I still plowed through and it was a reasonably quick read. There were one or two twists in the storyline. I think because I'm not a mother is the reason why I wasn't engaged in this. Still, a great book should have been able to keep me interested and this novel failed to do that. Who knows - it might be a better movie. Thanks, Netgalley, for this arc.

This book uses all of these things in a story that combines thriller, paranormal and mental illness – it’s up to you as the reader to interpret the unreliable narration of Laurie, the main character, to decide on yourself how large a role these things play.

Laurie is an excellent main character, she’s an ordinary first time mother trying to keep her babies safe. She’s intelligent, resourceful and trying to survive the most stressful time of her life with little to no support from her total ass hat of a husband. He makes it abundantly clear from the moment the twins are born that it’s all very inconvenient for him – this only adds to the sense of claustrophobia and panic, which you feel throughout this book.

The chapters are split between the perspectives of Laurie and Harper, the investigating officer, which gives you two sides to the story to help you form your opinion on what’s real and what isn’t. I was hooked from the beginning of this book though I did find myself a bit frustrated with the ending as it was left somewhat open to interpretation.

I’d recommend steering clear of this book if you’re a parent of very young children, it plays very heavily on a parent’s fears for their children and will probably result in you giving up on sleep altogether until your offspring is 18…
This story gave me chills, which is probably the highest praise I could give any kind of thriller!

If you're read the blurb of this one, you're probably thinking... WTH? Little Darlings is definitely creepy and different, but it touches on subject matter that I think is important (regardless how strange the backstory is).

Lauren is a new mom to twin boys. Her husband isn't exactly 'hands on' when it comes to the boys, which leaves Lauren to take care of them on her own. She endures all the feedings and sleepless nights without the help of her significant other. While she was still in the hospital, she claims that someone tried to steal her babies and replace them with 'creatures'. Everyone chalks it up to her being sleep deprived. Then she comes home and still sees the mysterious woman from the hospital. She refuses to leave the house, but her husband pushes. She decides to go to the park when the unthinkable happens... someone takes her boys. They are found shortly after they went missing, but she swears that they aren't the same boys.

I will say that I didn't love the story, but I couldn't stop reading because I needed to see what happened. I do wish the ending had 'more'. It seems to just get resolved, we're given some background, and things are back to normal? I will say that it was spooky at times and I think any mom can relate to the feeling of absolute exhaustion after having a baby.

Awesome debut novel Melanie Golding! This is an interesting tale of a mother who gives birth to twins and then immediately starts seeing this old, raggedy woman who wants to trade her babies for Lauren's. The story is based on the old fairy stories of changelings - fairy children who are left in place of human children taken by the fairies. It is both creepy and disturbing. I guess you could call the book a supernatural or paranormal psychological thriller. It was suspenseful wondering what Lauren would do to save her "real" children. I found DI Jo Harper's bull-dogged dedication to get to the bottom of what was really going on admirable. There were also a couple of red herrings in the story that made you think things might unfold differently than they actually did. The quotes at the beginning of each chapter from various folktales were really interesting.

Thanks to Melanie Golding and Crooked Lane Books through Netgalley for an advance copy in exchange for an honest review.

Actual rating: 2.25

This was for sure an eerie tale of Changeling folklore and a mother’s worst nightmare. I feel if I were a parent, I’d be a paranoid mess after reading this book.

On the characters: I’m all for Harper and Amy! Give me a troubled detective story any day, throw in some romantic angst and Journalistic investigations, and I’m happy. On the other hand, with Lauren, we never truly got a sense of who she was outside of being a mother in distress, and it was very off-putting. Her husband, Patrick... I wanted to throttle him! I don’t believe for one second that Lauren hadn’t noticed what a complete sh*t Patrick was until after the babies were born. From the get-go, he was a bastard. People don’t change like that so suddenly and so extremely, unless it’s poor characterization.

At the halfway mark and after the abduction, I became frustrated with Lauren’s chapters. The hysterics (although understandable to an extent) were repetitious and melodramatic. I looked forward to the conclusion of each, just to get back to DS Harper’s POV: the more pragmatic, investigative, rational approach. If I’m being honest, the Lauren chapters post-abduction progressed in a typical way: 1. Hysteria 2. Delusion/Therapy 3. Resolve —it went how I think anyone would expect this sort of story to play out (unsurprisingly). This whole middle bit (a good 40% of the book) is redundancy. It’s not until the 80% mark that the story begins pushing forward at a pace faster than a crawl. I didn’t quite buy into the ending, either. For a moment, it had me excited thinking it was going one way, but then threw in something else that was out of left field, and lost me again.

I’ll say this: the authoress, Melanie Golding, knows how to write. I feel that given a less constricting story, she can surely work wonders. The book was effectively creepy at times. I love a good, dark folktale, and this one delivered, but I feel like it could have gone much further into the Changeling lore, and at the same time focused less on Lauren’s consistently troubled paranoia in the hospital ward, where I feel like the plot was trapped— often muddled by circuitous plotting details, or characters repeating the same dialogue/questions over and over.

Thank you NetGalley and Crooked Lane Books for an Advanced Reader’s Copy of this book. This book had a promising start with the story starting with the birth of twins and then quickly there is an attempted kidnap. This book kept me very intrigued for the first half. However this book started to feel like a lot of other books that are in this genre which was a little tired, at least for me. Not a bad book at all, just sort of typical.

Postpartum depression is often discussed, but people forget postpartum anxiety and psychosis. I had postpartum anxiety, and I was alone. It left me unable to shower some days because I was afraid to leave my baby for too long. The beginning of Little Darlings was the closest I've ever seen my own struggles with my baby portrayed. It was well written and "unputdownable." I love books where you're left confused about what the hell is really happening, and this was one of the better ones I've read recently.

Even if no one believes her, Lauren Tranter knows what she saw. It started with that awful woman. Dazed after a complicated birth, Lauren fought her off when she attempted to swap her twins with her own odd pair. Everyone tells her she imagined it, but then why does she keep seeing the woman lurking outside her house? Months later, after a rare trip to the park, she loses sight of the twins. When they’re finally located, she knows they’re not the same. They’ve been switched. And now Lauren will do anything to get her babies back. Unless … unless she’s wrong about everything.

There’s perhaps nothing more frustrating than not being believed, and author Melanie Golding explores this with aplomb. Lauren believes what she saw, and Golding draws the reader into her world. And yes, she might be exhausted after giving birth, but it makes sense that a macabre woman broke into her hospital room— why is this so hard for everyone else to believe? And yet she then manages to flip everything on its head and that’s where this book finds it’s bite.

Golding frames the story almost like a police procedural, focusing scenes not just on Lauren, but also Detective Sergeant Joanna Harper, a solid detective with an independent streak. It’s a genius move. Shouldn’t the authorities, of all people, be able to solve a mystery? Joanna serves as the logical side of the investigation, tracking down clues and combating her own personal issues. She grounds the story, giving readers something to latch onto, while Lauren spirals into a battle with herself and the supernatural.

And this book certainly has a fantastical bent. Golding weaves in rich folklore, drawing from changeling stories, and the result is a real world being intruded on by the unexplainable. Each chapter produces more questions while Lauren struggles with mothering two beings she doesn’t believe to be hers. It’s incredibly effective, and often heartbreaking.

Chilling and highly readable, Lauren Golding has crafted a novel that straddles genres. Whether readers believe the magical or the psychological, one thing is for certain: this story should come with a warning— “Caution: Book’s spine might snap under all this tension.”

We've all seen the sensational news reports that exploit the most horrific episodes of postpartum depression or psychosis: the suicides, or worse, the killings of children. Perhaps we've even questioned "WHO could do such a thing?" Perhaps we wondered why it happened or how could this happen in today's world.

Little Darlings dives headfirst into a woman's battle against postpartum psychosis... or does it? Maybe it's just a mystery book with some magic realism thrown in? Like the main character, readers can never be quite sure of what is real and what exists only in our minds.

This is a clever book, and I believe it is an important one. Rather than relying on mental illness to tie up the loose ends of a novel, this book delves into mental illness to show how something like postpartum psychosis can happen to anyone and how devastating it can be on a mother. Overall, a fascinating read.

Wow - what a good book! Read in 1 sitting! It kept you guessing - what was the truth and reality, and what was imagined? I really enjoyed this book - kept my interest the whole time!

I received this book from Netgalley in return for an honest review.

I really enjoyed this psychological thriller set in England. The MC Lauren Tranter is convinced someone is trying to steal her babies and replace them with changelings. She won't leave the house or do anything. Finally she goes to visit some friends at the park who also had babies, and she falls asleep on the bench. When she wakes up her babies are gone. The police find her babies, but she believes they were changed.

Lauren is definitely an unreliable narrator so I'm still not sure if the babies were switched or not. Regardless, it was a great story and a really fun read.

Little Darlings is a mix of just about everything. Mystery, Thriller, paranormal feels, fairytale retelling & horror. It's unlike any story I've read before. I very much enjoyed it all!

Lauren & her husband have just had twin boys. While she's still in the hospital a woman sneaks into her room trying to swap her babies for some creepy unhuman creatures she claims to be her own twins. The woman is not found & everyone believes Lauren is simply losing her mind. While on an outing to the park Lauren's babies go missing only to be found a short time later. But Lauren believes the returned babies aren't hers.

This was quite the ride! And surprisingly relatable. I could relate to how Lauren felt dealing with a newborn. The exhaustion, stress, worry, all the feelings & emotions that new mother's deal with during postpartum. Making her second guess, was she really protecting her babies from a crazy lady or was she the one going crazy.

Little Darlings was a fun, unsettling story that had me creeped out while reading after dark.

This has definitely a case of the blurb sounding better than the book turned out to be. First of all, it takes until practically halfway through the book before the children may or may not have been taken and switched. So that should tell you how much filler is in here. Second, it felt half like a police procedural mystery (which I'm not a fan of), with the constant flipping of narration between our main character, and a detective...who isn't even mentioned in the blurb....and half like a poor knockoff of "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Way too much time was spent on her background, and not enough on our supposed main character, Lauren, who felt like a side character in the second half of the book, because the detectives the only one able to propel the plot forward!

Once the story gets into the meat of what the blurb promised, they spend too much time on "Is it all in Lauren's head?" type storytelling. If this had been an actual story where Lauren was free to pursue what happened and made the discoveries the detective did, it would have been more compelling. Alas, it just didn't work, and the ending left a lot to be desired . The writing was also pedestrian, which didn't help with the storytelling either. I only gave it two stars because I (begrudgingly) for through it to see how it would end. Turns out, I could have skipped it altogether.

Great book! Could not put this book down! Very interesting plot. Looking forward to reading more by this author!

Little Darlings is real creepy and unsettling. It is well-written. A mystery thriller mixed in with dark fairytale and folk tale. I was hooked from start to finish. I like how it gives two POVs, Lauren and DS Harper, both of which are interesting characters. I was a bit disappointed how things played out in the end, I was expecting so much more. But overall, it's a great, if unnerving, read.

Well, this book was creepy and terrifying right from the beginning. Lauren, a new mother to twins - is tired to say the least, and definitely lacking in help from her husband. During her first night at the hospital after having the twins she is threatened by a women trying to swap the babies, although when investigated Lauren is left to think she is imagining it all. The book takes a dark turn when it follows Grimms Fairy Tales in real life. Little Darlings definitely had me turning the page to find out what happened next but I did not love the characters in this book. Each of them seemed to have their own hidden agenda and more and more dirty secrets kept popping up.

Thank you NetGalley, Crooked Lane Books, and Melanie Golding for letting me read this ARC!

Little Darlings is part suspense part folklore and it is great fun although slightly unsettling. The novel is a portrait of Laura and her psyche as she enters motherhood with twins.

Laura has just given birth to two perfect twin boys when in the wee hours of a sleepless night a ratty woman appears. The woman proposes that they each swap a baby but if Lauren won’t swap one than the woman will swap both. It is possible that in a Grimm brothers like twist that the babies that the woman my be changelings

This woman seems to continually make appearance and then the boys are briefly kidnapped. Upon their return Lauren swears that they have been swapped. She panics and attempts to return them to the lake in accordance with folklore and is then put into a psychiatric care unit for mothers and babies.

Little Darlings is a raw look at what new mothers will do to protect their children and how that can wear on them mentally. I think that the way that this book is paced will suck you in and you just may be surprised by the outcome.

CREEPY! I would say this is a psychological thriller with a supernatural twist. Definitely reminded me if a Grimms fairy tale. It was truly haunting. Lauren gives birth to twins and taking care of them without any help had been exhausting. With her husband advise she gets out of the house and goes for a walk in the park with the twins. She dozes off and when she wakes up they're gone! Once found, even though the babies look exactly like hers, she knows they are not her babies! It only gets more sinister from there.... I could not put this one down. Overall dark and folktaleish. Very enjoyable. Highly recomended.