Really didn't keep me engaged unfortunately. may be something i'll try again. I couldn't get into it and unfortunately didn't finish it. I had really high hopes.

I am so mad at myself for not starting this sooner. I was gripped from the first few pages. Interesting characters, great plot, a wild ride.

This was a fast paced story with so much going on with each character. It made it fun to wonder how it was all going to end and try to figure out what was really going on, but I did make following any one story line a little harder (why did I keep getting Evan and Ken confused??). Overall I thought this was a fun read.

Thank you very much to St. Martin's Press and NetGalley for this advance copy of The Block Party by Jamie Day in exchange for my honest review. The Block Party is due out this summer, 7/18/23.

Everyone reading my reviews knows I love a messy domestic/family drama, so this premise really intrigued me - a summer Memorial Day block party gone wrong with murder? Sign me up. This one didn't wow me like I expected it to, and it took me A LOT longer to finish than I normally take for an average length novel - I think there were quite a few couples that all live on Alton Road, and it was a bit challenging to keep them all straight. Plus, we had the addition of their kids and their intermixing, and it was a lot of characters. I also would throw in here a trigger warning for alcoholism, because Alex, one of our main protagonists drinks a ton of wine and it's a main focus of her character arc. More triggers - one of our main characters attempts suicide, and there's a lot of talk about drug addiction and an instance when a 16/17 year old is sleeping with an adult.

Thank you again to the publishers and NetGalley for this ARC - The Block Party is out next month, 7/18/23.

When community isn't all it's cracked up to be. Follow a group of nosey neighbours through an event that wasn't on their agenda. Sometimes it's ok to be sociable and help out your neighbours, other times maybe you just need to let sleeping dogs lay.

This book got off to a slow start with me, and I have nothing to really judge it against in terms of real life experience. This story takes place in a suburb, in a rich cul de sac. Neighbors live right next to each other and know the comings and goings of the families. I have lived almost all my life in a very rural community on 16 acres and the neighbors here certainly don't have block parties. There is a lot of gossip, infidelity and secrets among the families. One woman is suspected of killing her husband on a cruise, another's husband is an abuser. All the kinds of things you might find juicy are in this book. It takes place over a year and is told from multiple points of view. In the end, I think lessons learned are that revenge just ends up hurting everyone in the end and that secrets that could cause life causing changes should not be kept in the dark. Thanks NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for the chance to read this.

Really good thriller of a read! I enjoyed the characters, the plot lines and the suspense. While there may have been too many secrets to be believable, it was a fun read.

This was a 3-star read for me. I appreciated the dual POV and multiple timelines to help unfold all the drama, but I had a hard time enjoying the characters. It felt like this book tried to be adult and YA fiction at the same time, and it didn't work for me. I didn't like Alex and Lettie, the narrators of all the drama. Alex is a nosy-neighbor who needs something better to do, and Lettie is an annoying teenager. There were a lot of other characters in this story, but none of them were very developed. While this wasn't my favorite murder mystery, I was still interested in finding out the truth, and it certainly kept me entertained. Thank you NetGalley for this advanced copy!

⭐️: 2.5/5

The residents of Alton Road have an infamous summer Block Party every year, but this year, the party ends in a murder. As the secrets and scandals of the neighbors are slowly revealed over the course of the year leading up to the night of the murder, it is clear that nobody and nothing is as it seems to the outside.

After reading the first chapter, I had high hopes for this book. Unfortunately, as the book went on, I found that the intrigue of the beginning was, in fact, a fluke. The further I got into the more, the more inconsistent the writing became. Sometimes I breezed through chapters, and sometimes reading it was so mind numbing that I kept focusing on how badly the conversations and dialogue was structured, not to mention the how wildly and unrealistically dramatic the dialogue is. The pacing was also wildly off, since we start with a big event, and then backtrack AN ENTIRE YEAR and go through that year leading up to the big event, without any meaningful time jumps back into the present. Once we get back to the “present,” there’s even more lead up, with not enough suspense to make me care. This book would have very much benefitted from more editing, primarily in the structure of the narrative. If we jumped back and forth in time like, at all, I think I would have been more intrigued by the book, rather than bored of how little is actually happening for most of it. The characters themselves were not great also. Lettie was truly insufferable as just a spoiled, self-involved, stereotypical Gen-Z teenage daughter character who thinks she knows better than everyone, with absolutely no nuance. Alex is the worst kind of main character, from the ill-advised intrusion into other’s business all the way to the overdone “rich, unhappy woman who can’t stop drinking” trope. I really did want to like this one, since it seemed to have so much promise, but ultimately, it wasn’t for me.

Thank you to @netgalley and @stmartinspress for this eARC in exchange for my honest review!!

Short synopsis: At a block party of a week to do town in Massachusetts, someone dies.

My thoughts: I really liked the setting, and while there were multiple people involved we only had two perspectives which I loved. It helped to not get people confused.

There were definitely some unexpected twists revealed at the end, and I was here for it. Totally bingable and fast paced.

The newsletter was such s fun edition, I laughed out loud at some of the neighborly gossip and the things brought up.

This reminded me soo much of Big Little Lies my Liane Moriarty, so if you enjoyed that you’ll love this.

Read if you love:
- Your neighbors
- Secrets and lies
- Unexpected twists
- Mother/daughter POV
- Bingeable thriller

I did a mix of physical and audio on this. I really enjoyed both narrators on this. They did such a great job voicing Lettie and Alex.

My goodness! This was a really really fun mystery/thriller. The Block Party was a well-paced story about secrets, lies, and their consequences. I thoroughly enjoyed each character, as they were all so thoroughly and accurately crafted, that I felt like I knew them. This was a completely delightful summer read!

Thank you to St Martin’s Press and NetGalley for an e-ARC of The Block Party.

Every neighborhood has secrets, but the residents on Alton Street may have more than most. In the course of a year, they’ll find that the ones they’ve tried to keep buried may just come to light, and at the cost of someone’s life.

If you’re looking for a twisty neighborhood drama with strong women and a jam-packed ending, this book is for you.

This book was delicious, domestic drama filled with thrills. Absolutely loved getting to know the neighbors on Alton Street. Their secrets and relationships kept me glued to my Kindle and I have a major book hangover from such a scintillating book. Bravo to Jamie Day for a great thriller and many thanks to NetGalley for the advanced copy in exchange for my honest review. This one is a winner!

During Alton Road’s Summer block party there is an incident, a shooting. Unheard of in a neighborhood as exclusive as Alton Road. But the cul-de-sac is full of secrets on secrets and a year’s worth of lies and betrayals might be just enough to set off a chain of events ending in tragedy.

This one was kind of a nonstarter for me from the beginning. With The Block Party Jamie Day does a really good job of writing the kind of tiresome dysfunctional people who mask their terrible behaviors with affluence and then are shocked when consequences happen. The sorts of people who let their personal issues build up behind an ever thinning veneer of politeness and expectations until something explodes and no one quite wants to admit what caused it. Which is to say, I did not care for or about the characters in this one and the characters are the core of this book.

The thing is, I cannot fault Day for my dislike of her characters or the story. The idea of seeing the consequences of all the secrets and miseries in a rich and exclusive neighborhood coming to light, the idea of hearing the shooting happen and then going back and seeing the lead up to it, that is pretty brilliant. The problem is that going back a year to see that lead up leaves the reader spending a lot of time with a bunch of passively unlikeable people and a few actively terrible ones. This does, rather unfortunately, include the protagonists. Alex is a professional intermediary and the sort of person who cannot and will not let a problem lie without sticking her nose in it. Which leads to her stressing herself beyond belief and then drinking about it while still insisting that everyone in the neighborhood relies on her. Lettie, Alex's daughter, is a high school senior out to save the world. The cusp of Lettie’s plot is kind of a mush. She is a good kid who wants to do the most good she can, but she also feels much more fictional than a lot of the other characters, the way she thinks and reasons through things feels really YA protagonist or sitcom teen.

That said, the split between the protagonists’ social worlds was well handled. Alex only really interacts with her family and the women of Alton Road, so she sees all the worries about cheating husbands and stalkers, the abuses that get hidden from kids. Lettie mostly interacts with three other young people on the cul-de-sac, so she gets the teen drama, the bits that are hidden because none of the adults look for them, the bad decisions that have all the potential in the world to become worse. It functions well to build layers to the drama, aspects that could easily be glossed over with either character as the solo protagonist. I will say, despite having more issues with the writing on Lettie, I feel like the issues in her chapters are more interesting if also just as messed up as some of the issues from Alex’s chapters. The kids are decidedly not all right.

The thing is, there is very little specific that stuck with me about The Block Party. I can remember most of what happened and why, but all that really remains after having read the book is the emotional equivalent to a shrug. Maybe an eye roll regarding the characters as a whole. And that really does not feel fair to the book or Day, I legitimately am left feeling like I need to put in more work to vet the thrillers I read beyond just reading the blurb. But, my experience of the book is still a two out of five.

It’s time for the annual Alton Road Block Party. It’s sure to be a killer party…literally.

This was a great summer pool read. Gossipy neighbors, a mystery, and real issues that face seemingly perfect people behind closed doors. It was fun.

The Block Party

⭐️⭐️⭐️

Woah. This one is a wild ride. Get ready for some family drama.

The Block Party covers a close knit community where so many of their stories are intertwining. I think the thriller label was maybe a little bit of a mistake in genre, the vast majority of this book was drama.

Overall I enjoyed this more once I was further into it. Definitely some far fetched drama, but I liked the ending.

The premise of this one rally intrigued me-I do like stories about dysfunction and relationship drama. Ultimately this book wasn't for me for a couple of reasons. First the characters were flat and unrelatable. There wasn't anything to keep invested in what happened to them. There was a lot going in this story, a lot of subterfuge, which I typically do enjoy-but again, it wasn't presented in a way that made me compelled to care.

The block party was a excellent book! I like it a lot more than I thought I would, I thought it was going to be just another " neighborhood* mystery / thriller, which in a way it was, but the cast of characters and the twist and turned really made this book stand out and kept me up until the wee hours in the morning reading, because I just had to know who was the murderer! If you like a good mystery / who done it, do yourself a favor and pick up this book today! Definitely four out of four stars!

The Block Party by Jamie Day opens with a group of neighbors who live in the nicer part of town on Alton Rd. Their lives are intertwined along with a host of secrets. Things start to unravel when a mysterious couple and their wayward son move in. As the street hosts its’ annual block party, a murder occurs, and secrets start to unravel. You must read the novel to uncover the murder, the neighborhood secrets and to learn how the lives of those who live there intersect. A little complicated at times due to the number of characters and how they know or are involved with each other. Some characters are well developed while others need a little more. Overall, a decent story. I received this novel as an ARC. All thoughts are my own.

🎉 The Block Party - Jamie Day

4.5 ⭐️ - I immediately need to rewatch Desperate Housewives after reading this book! The lies, secrets, twists and turns, the drama… I loved it all.

Meet your neighbors. The neighbors in an exclusive cul-de-sec, Alton Rd, are intertwined in all of each others secrets and lies that are unknown to the outside world. But on the night of the annual Memorial Day block party, there’s a murder. Who did it and why?

This book and plot was wild, dramatic, mysterious, and I couldn’t get enough. I was on the edge of my seat the whole time and couldn’t wait to find out what happened in this exclusive neighborhood. The chapters were short with changing POVs and the story was so gripping that it moved very quickly. The story takes place a year prior to the murder and it is honestly perfect to unfold all of the secrets, lies, and rivalries between neighbors leading up to the murder. There were a lot of characters and connections that were a bit confusing, but cleared up as the story went on. As I was listening, all I could think about was rewatching Desperate Housewives. If you’re a fan, this one’s for you. This book is perfect for all you neighborhood gossips who need a summer read!

This domestic thriller hits neighborhoods on 7/18 so keep your eyes open for it!! Thank you Netgalley, St. Martin Press, and Macmillan Audio for the early reader and listener copies!