This historical fiction is a dual timeline between 1965 Ellie and 2010 Kayla, setting in North Carolina. I enjoyed learning of the SCOPE project which helped register Blacks to vote in the 1960s. The storylines seems a bit forced until the end. However. true to Chamberlin's writing style, I enjoyed this read. Thank you, Netgalley, for the opportunity to read this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This story will stay with me for quite a while. Wow. I couldn’t put it down and definitely did not want it to end. What an amazing author.

This sounded like something that would be up my alley, but I just could not get into this so I did not finish it.

Wow! When I started this book, I thought it was going to be a thriller, but I got so much more. I loved the historical aspect, and parts of it even had me tearing up. Definitely a great read!

The Last House on the Street by Diane Chamberlain is told from different viewpoints from 1965 and 2010. The back and forth between the past and present is a format I enjoy, mixing the emotional past of the Civil Rights movement with the emotional present for one family.

Thank you to St. Martin's Press and NetGalley.

Diane Chamberlain’s métier is crafting a story that links the past and the present in unique ways, from a contemporary artist restoring a historic mural in Big Lies in a Small Town to time-traveling in The Dream Daughter, she has a true gift for finding new ways to explore how the present is built on the past. The Last House on the Street is another unique look at the past through today. In this book, Kayla Carter is building a house, one that was supposed to be a dream home for her family, but now her husband died in an accident in the home and she is conflicted. Does she really want to live there now? Add to that, there is a woman warning her against moving there and people say the forest behind the house is haunted. And it sure seems so.

In the past, there is the story of Ellie Hockley, who joins Freedom Summer registering voters. She is unique in that she is not a volunteer coming from the north but a local Southern young woman who wants to make a difference so much she forges her father’s name on the permission form. In her work, she meets a young Black man and falls in love. And of course, the South is the South so they do not live happily ever after.

Diane Chamberlain cannot write a bad novel, but I sure wish she would stop writing white saviors. Ellie did not seem real, she felt like a plot device and that is disappointing. I understand the desire to highlight the sins of the past, but using a white savior as the lens distorts the past and washes away the sins. I understand she wants to write novels that speak to big problems, novels that matter, but let them be more honest.

I received an e-galley of The Last House on the Street from the publisher through NetGalley.

The Last House on the Street at St. Martin’s Press | Macmillan
Diane Chamberlain author site
Big Lies in a Small Town by Diane Chamberlain
The Dream Daughter by Diane Chamberlain
The Stolen Marriage by Diane Chamberlain

Another fabulous book by Diane Chamberlain! Told in a dual timeline by Kayla Carter in 2010 and Ellie Hockley in 1965 that flows seamlessly between characters and decades. This book mixes historical fiction dealing with Ellie's experiences during the high tensions of the Civil Rights Movement and a thrilling mystery happening to Kayla's family in modern times. It was a hard book to put down while it easily held my attention from the intriguing beginning to the climatic end. Their stories have stayed with me many days after finishing it and I miss the characters and setting of Round Hill, North Carolina as if they were my own neighbors.
I highly recommend this suspenseful and emotionally charged book. I am very grateful to Netgalley and St. Martin's Press for the opportunity to read an ARC of this fantastic book in exchange for a honest review.

The Last House on the Street was a really good read, told in alternating viewpoints - Kayla, in 2010 and Ellie, in 1965. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and loved the characters. I also really enjoyed reading about the SCOPE project, I had never heard of it before.

As always an interesting topic with an excellent narrative. Diane Chamberlain never disappoints me.

The Last House on the Street is set in Round Hill, NC. It has two timelines. The first one is in 1965 and the second one in 2010.

In 1965, Ellie Hockley is a college student at UNC when she gets involved in the Civil Rights movement. Ellie decides to join the SCOPE project to make a difference. The program entails having white people motivate black people to vote.

By joining SCOPE, Ellie alienates her family, her friends, and worse she becomes someone the Klan is interested in. Ellie doesn't care about any of that after she starts visiting the homes of black people and learning about the importance of them voting to get the help they need like new roads, electricity, etc.

In 2010, Ellie is returns to North Carolina for the first time in over four decades. Ellie is back to take care of her dying brother and her elderly mother too.

In this same timeline, we also meet Kayla. Kayla Carter is an architect. She is also a recent widow. Her husband was an architect too and he died in an accident in her new home located in Shadow Ridge Estates.

Kayla has mixed feelings about the new home. On the one hand, the house was the dream that she and her husband created. On the second hand, she doesn't feel safe living there when weird things begin to happen.

There are so many questions...

What happened to Ellie in 1965? What is the connection between Ellie and Kayla? And why is someone threatening Kayla and her daughter?

The Last House on the Street was quite an interesting, compelling and engaging novel. I was fearful for Ellie and Wyn from the very beginning. I was also trying to guess what happened and fearing the worst. For me, hands down, the 1965 timeline was much more addicting than the contemporary one.

Why not a 5? I just didn't quite believe the big revelation at the end.

Cliffhanger: No

4/5 Fangs

Really enjoyed this book. I loved how the author has readers going back and fourth between the past and present time lines. Characters and story flowed nicely and I kept wanting to read more! This book kept me guessing and I loved the little feel of suspense it held for me. I would definitely recommend this book to others!

Diane Chamberlain never, ever disappoints! I devoured this book so quickly! I was so intrigued with the story line, and kept trying to figure out some of the character connections along the way. It's a heartbreaking tale of true love , racism and equal rights. You won't want to put this one down!

All I will say with this one is try to go into it blind and just enjoy the reading. Diane Chamberlain can surely write a book that you don't want to end. She is one of my favorite authors.

Diane Chamberlain is one of those authors that will never disappoint you. When you pick up one of her books, you KNOW you're going to enjoy it. So I was not surprised in the slightest when I got through "The Last House on the Street" in one. single. day.

Ellie's story was a beautiful telling of who you can love and who you can trust. Chamberlain wrote so beautifully and heartbreakingly about the struggle between whites and blacks in the South, mid-1960s. It was accurate...and it was terrifying. What struck me most was how well Chamberlain subtly hinted at the fact that these same problems exist today, and we need to stop ignoring them. While this time period was a slow build to the main action, it was so worth it in the end.

In our other timeline, set in 2010, we find Kayla - a newly widowed architect struggling with the loss of her husband and the sometimes scary woods surrounding the home she and said husband had designed and built together. She and her little girl deal with being harassed and haunted...but why?

Eventually the two timelines come together for one explosive finale and I Am Here For It! Wow!

This book was a solid 4.5 stars for me. I highly recommend it to my fellow Chamberlain Fans and anyone who enjoys historical fiction and/or a dual timeline - which are my favorite go-tos.

A HUGE Thank You to NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for an advanced copy of the book for me to read and review.

LOVED! I'm not sure how to word this, but the storytelling of The Last House on the Street is SO good. The writing flowed and the pacing was perfect, but just the way Diane Chamberlain chose to tell this story was amazing. The duel timelines and POV's, the sequence of events, and choosing when to change timelines was masterful. When I started this book I thought this was my first by Diane Chamberlain, but it turns out another book I 5 starred a few years ago was also by her- The Dream Daughter. Now I'm off to read her backlist!

Diane Chamberlain weaves another timely story in dual timelines, 1965 and 2010. North Carolina 1965,,civil rights, voting rights, KKK, a family and community divided. 2010 a new house is built at the end of the street where bad things happened in 1965 and the mysteries surrounding this are eventually revealed.

While I love Diane Chamberlain, this book just didn't hit the mark with me. I read about half, and found myself reading a chapter and putting it down until the next day. I normally read a book in a day, or more than one book.
The writing, as always was flawless, the story, going back and forth just wasn't working for me.
Thanks to the author, publisher and netgalley for the ARC.

I absolutely loved this novel. I read through it om just a couple of days because I couldn't out it down. I love stories that interweve the present and past, it always makes for a better book in my opinion. I loved the elements of mystery and a little bit of suspense that kept me wanting to know what happened next. The parts set in the past during the Civil Rights Movement were especially good, but I loved the present day story as well

I am a big Diane Chamberlain fan and was so excited for this book. Typical to her style, she takes on social injustice issues of the past and weaves them together with a modern storyline. This one was good, but not as great as some of her other books. If I was reading it by any other author, I may not judge it as harshly. It is a good story, but I found this one predictable and it lacked the connection with the characters that I have felt in her other works. Still a solid read.

I’ve really enjoyed the other Diane Chamberlain books I’ve read but this one didn’t work for me. DNF at 50%. Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for the advance reading copy.

I normally don't go for a dual timeline novel because it's <i>wayyyyyy overdone at this point</i>. However, somehow this sort of worked and I didn't mind it. Overall, I tend to have some mixed feelings about this novel. Like, I appreciate what this book was trying to do and what it was trying to say, but <i>have we not learned enough about the white savior narrative</i>? It's why I make a conscious choice not to teach books like [book:The Help|4667024] or [book:To Kill a Mockingbird|2657]. It ended up rubbing me the wrong way.

Had this novel just focused on the women's rights issues and the SCOPE, I probably would have rated it higher. Once it got into the klan stuff and her relationship with Wyn they started to lose me. Part of me is really upset we didn't get more African American perspective in this novel. Granted, I know Diane Chamberlain is a white woman so therefore she writes to the narrative she is comfortable with, but we hear about a lot of oppression in this book without hearing from the voices of the oppressed.

Anyways, I did <i>somewhat</i> enjoy this enough to give 3 stars. I just think, as someone who's job it is to teach and read historical accounts of various groups of people all day, that this was just a pretty packaged, mass-market, anti-racism book with a fluffy cover.

<i>I received a copy of this novel from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review</i>