This is an incredibly hard book to review. It is a complicated puzzle and just when you think you have it figured out it throws you onto a completely different path. What starts out as a mystery quickly becomes more of a gothic horror. The characters complex, flawed and broken. They are searching for their own resolutions to an event that connects them in a deep and heartbreaking way. Friendship, longing, secrets, acceptance, grief, and betrayal all play a role in their lives.

If what I said above intrigues you please give the book a chance. At times you will be confused, it is written from multiple points of view. The timeline does skip around. But I promise if you stick with it you will be blown away. At first I thought I hated it and wanted to throw it across the room but I would wake up in the morning dying to find out where the story was going to take me next. There are so many layers to this book. I found myself thinking about this book hours and days later piecing together what I had read previously. It is definitely worth a second read for me which I rarely do.

I will not spoil this book for you by writing an in-depth review. You will just have to read it for yourself. Without telling you too much, this story follows Wilder, Nat and Harper, three friends who are linked by a discovery they made one summer.

Thank you NetGalley and Tor Publishing Group for the advance copy for review.

I had never read this author before so I was excited as she has so many rave reviews! Initially, it is very odd and a little creepy as we meet Wilder, Nat, and Harper in the summer and we begin to hear the stories of The Dagger Man. I seriously had no idea where this was going and continued to be thrown by the real and imagined horrors as Wilder write, meets Sky, falls in love, and has no idea what he's in for! So many emotions ran through my mind as I contemplate the events and the. imaginings as things unfold. It's a gripping story unlike anything I've ever read and I'll be sure to read more of Ward as I'm blown away by her imagination!
Thanks to NetGalley for this ARC!

Looking Glass Sound lulls you with the setting and circumstances of a coming-of-age experience that takes place among three friends over the course of an ill-fated summer in the late 80s. It's one of those stories that softly strangles with a fraught, undefined sense of doom and vague, looming dread that has nothing to do with horror but rather the sweetly unbearable, eerily desperate poignancy of the passage of time, how hope and youth and friendship and loyalty will never feel the same again after you cross a certain threshold. It becomes a kind of fever dream, turned around and bewildering, where the people and their stories keep changing, moving, slipping from your grasp; nothing’s as you thought, and maybe you never properly understood the stakes of the story to begin with--or even whose story it really was. Circuitous and labyrinthine in its leading one towards and away from the truth, depending on whose truth it was, Looking Glass Sound left me with the most breathtakingly frustrating and beautiful ache in my heart, and honestly, it's all I could want in a book by Catriona Ward.

I don’t know how she does it…. But she does it every single time!
You never know what you’re going to get. But it doesn’t matter because when you open a Ward novel up you know you’re going to be sucked down a deep dark hole that you never want to climb out of. She is a true masterful storyteller and her stories never ceases to amaze me.

Looking Glass Sound by Catriona Ward kept me on the edge of my seat.
Her descriptive writing style, and the way she creates such an hair-raising atmosphere in her stories, is mind blowing.
She is a master at suspense.
I was so invested in the story, I wasn't ready for this one to end.
The writing and story was mesmerizing and it’s proof that Ward is brilliant at what she does.

"I received a complimentary copy of this book. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own."

Thank You NetGalley and Tor Nightfire for your generosity and gifting me a copy of this amazing eARC!

Excellent use of multiple timelines. Intrigiung characters. The mystery become creepier as the story progresses. Thanks to Netgalley for the opportunity to read this incredible book

When you start reading this one, you think “wow, this seems fairly normal for a Cat Ward story…”. You’re wondering where and when the signature Ward WTFness is going to hit.

But as you keep reading, you start to realize THE LAYERS. THE LAYERS are added via slight, quiet reveals and unsuspected twists and turns.

Then you take a deep breath as you realize the signature Cat Ward WTFness is in full effect after all.

I saw a review that called this a “frightening nesting doll of a novel” and that’s so accurate. There are layers up on layers here and it’s kinda amazing to watch it all unfold.

It might just be my favorite Ward novel so far.

I don’t know how to explain my feelings about this book. Most of my time reading it I confused and wondering what direction the story was going in. Eventually there was so much going on and so many different elements trying to be included. I didn’t really enjoy the writing, which is weird since this author’s 2022 book, Little Eve, was one of my favorite reads last year. A lot of this book kind of feels like YA and the characters seem very young. I’m still not sure how I felt about that. I also didn’t like that there were pretty much no chapters in this book. Overall, I’m pretty conflicted on my opinion of this book. I liked the creepy vibes and some of the surprising moments that took place but overall I’m too perplexed by a lot of the elements of this book that I can’t really say that I enjoyed it.

Thank you to Netgalley, Tor Publishing Group and Catriona Ward for this ARC ebook. Looking Glass Sound will be published August 8, 2023.

What an absolutely beautifully and terrifying novel! This is my second book by Ward and once again, she did not disappoint. My favorite aspect of this story was how untrustworthy the narrator is….you start to question whether he’s truly all there!

Thank you so much Netgalley for the chance to read this advanced copy in exchange for a review!
I absolutely love psychology thrillers so I was very excited when I was approved for this read! Could not put it down!

As I suspected, Catriona Ward stumped me again. This twisty horror thriller had me guessing all over the place but in the end, I finally got it! Honestly, I was quite confused at times, not unlike my read of The Last House on Needless Street. This was an excellent read, I fell hard for the cast (again, like TLHoNS) and I’ll definitely be recommending it to friends. Bravo Catriona! Bravo!

Three young friends are haunted by the decades-old mysteries of a small, coastal town.

Part ghost story, part metafiction, part witchcraft, <u>Looking Glass Sound</u> is all kinds of chaotic insanity in the absolute best ways possible. The twists and turns and reveals were all extremely confusing as this book within a book within a book within a book continued to unfold. I enjoyed the characters and Ward's pacing, it was just the delivery of some of the final reveals that prevented this from being a perfect five star read for me. Highly recommend for suspense/thriller/horror fans.

This book was… okay. I do like Catriona Ward’s weird storytelling (weird in the best way possible!), but this book just wasn’t for me. I found myself lost and confused, and not in a good way. There were definitely some interesting, mindbending aspects, which I like. But this book just wasn’t for me.

Dark, twisted, and weird. And I loved it!🤣 This book is hard to review without giving away what is actually going on. It was like a book within a book within a book, if that makes ANY sense whatsoever. I enjoyed the first half more than the second half, but it was still a solid 4 star read! It is basically a story about storytelling and how you can make yourself the hero in the story, no matter if you truly are or not. It will required your full attention, or you might feel confused. I think you will either love this one, or hate it.

It follows Wilder, Harper and Nat from teenaged years through adulthood in Whistler Bay. There was a serial killer in town, and someone was sneaking into houses taking polaroids of sleeping children with a knife to their neck. Same people or different? Wilder meets someone named Skye in college and they become friends. Skye encourages Wilder to write a memoir about what happened at Whistler Bay all those years ago. But why? What are his motives?

Thank you to Tor Publishing Group, Tor Nightfire & NetGalley for this advanced copy.

I'm a huge fan of Catriona Ward. This is the fourth book oh hers I've read and she is seriously on top of her game.

To call this just a "horror" book would be insulting almost. It's got multiple characters, timelines, and story arcs yet it flows beautifully and you never see where this novel is taking you. As with her other books, reading Catriona Ward is like kayaking down a river blindfolded. It feels dangerous, exciting, and your focus is solely on the ride to (hopefully) safety. But you also feel exhilarated and don't want it to end.

This is easily on my list of top ten books of the year.

I received an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Catriona Ward is an author that has consistently kept me guessing with each of her novels--never able to form an "answer" to any part of the mysteries on my own. LOOKING GLASS SOUND is no exception.

In fact, this one might just be her most psychologically twisting one to date.

". . . Good and bad can feel like the same thing, I think, if they're intense enough."

In this book, we have Wilder Harlow, a teenager vacationing in Whistler Cottage in Maine. The cottage had been left to his family by a now deceased Uncle, and this vacation was to help the family get back together in a sense. While there, he meets Nat and Harper--one a poor boy living with his father there, the other a rich girl whose family owns a vacation cottage to spend summers in. The three quickly become a "set", which is one of the things I love most about this story, as Wilder never felt he "fit in" at his school and town. Yet the summer founded a beautiful friendship among the three.

The characters are each complex in their individual ways--Wilder longs to be a writer, Nat has issues with his father that are only implied, and Harper has more baggage than you would ever expect. However, their summer friendship puts them all on the same level. The words flow beautifully, and no matter how much you know you're NOT hearing, the pacing and actions described make this a compulsive read.

"The stones are singing and I feel it . . . that I'm home . . . "

After an incident one summer, the book takes us to the near future, where Wilder is navigating college life and trying to write down his memories of Whistler Cottage. There he meets a friend who's obsession with that last summer rivals Wilder's own.

From there on, I was simply taken on a journey. The various points-of-view and characters (albeit unreliable narrators), propelled the story forward while leaving more questions than answers. It isn't until the very end--when all is said and done--that I was able to appreciate how the clues were provided throughout. I find it truly amazing how the author is able to get me so engrossed in a story--every time--that I fail to anticipate any of the "twists" in the novel until after they're revealed.

"Writer's block isn't being unable to write, I discover--it's being unable to feel . . ."

Another spectacular novel from an author who consistently delivers.

Highly recommended.

*Thank you NetGalley, for the arc.*

I received an ARC of this novel from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

A serial killer lives on the rocky coast of Looking Glass Sound. The victims are both the actual dead and the living who remain shattered by the crimes.

Looking Glass Sound by Catriona Ward
4.5 stars

This book was so uniquely strange.

Sometimes it was so incredibly painful to try to wrap your brain around what was the reality of the narrative and what was just fiction wrapped inside of more fiction. All in all, I think this was about four books tucked inside four books, like a russian doll of literary crime thrillers and horror novels. It was meta to the max. In the end, the story and character journeys were intriguing enough to make it worthwhile to sort through all the entangled lines of plot, character, narrative, and story.

The setting was fabulous, the small seaside town in Maine with haunted caverns and whistling stone beaches will stay with me for some time. The story that persisted beneath the various lines of truth and fiction, the story of a trio of young friends who were marred by the crimes of their parents and the adults surrounding them, was heartfelt, emotionally complex, and nuanced. I truly enjoyed this book - it both challenged and entertained me, forcing me to think about the layers of storytelling, and the purpose through which we write and consume narratives.

4-4.5* I absolutely adore Catriona Ward’s writing; it’s eerie, it’s poetic, and devolves into this sort of fever dream vibe which absolutely sucks me in and almost always makes her books impossible to put down. This story was no different, had plot twists up until the very last sentence and I loved it. The only thing that took me out of the story a bit was the re-living/telling of the story from different POVs felt a little repetitive for me, but also…I just historically don’t like that in books because I’m a bit impatient haha. Regardless, it was phenomenal, and I’m still thinking about the atmosphere of the story days later.

This is my second Catriona Ward book, and I really like the way she blends mystery with suspense and confusion before tying it all up at the very, very end. For most of this book I really didn’t know what direction was up or down, while also being really vested in our main characters. We start with a memoir and a summer at the beach, from 16 year old Wilder’s POV. He’s stuck in his late uncle’s coastal Maine house with his bickering parents, and really not looking forward to an entire summer of this on repeat, when he meets Harper and Nat, two kids his age who also live here and seem inseparable.

Wilder joins their duo and they spend the summer drinking, exploring, and generally just being teenagers in 1990. But when talk about The Dagger Man surfaces, along with ominous Polaroids of a mystery person holding a dagger to the face of sleeping children, their breezy summer takes a turn. And when Wilder comes back the following summer, everything is different.

We go back and forth in time from Wilder to a mysterious Pearl, to Sky and Skye, and follow Wilder into his college years and eventually beyond. He’s trying to write a novel about his experience during those two summers, but what he doesn’t know is that someone else wants his words too. Flash forward to 2023 and Wilder finally makes it back to The Sound, and is prepared for one last act of humanity…he’s finally going to finish the novel he started all those decades ago. Only there is someone else in his cottage, someone who doesn’t want to be written about, someone who is supposed to have been dead…

What I loved most about this story is that we go from a typical teenage summer to darkness and intrigue, and then into the darker years of someone’s psyche, before getting thrust into an entirely different reality that we, or at least I, did not (in the SLIGHTEST) see coming. Not being able to guess the ending or even the general overall truth of a story until I’ve already been rendered into a page turning zombie, desperate for the next word, is one of the most fun feelings as a reader.

*Thanks Netgalley for an ARC of this book in exchange for my honest review!

I was definitely captivated by this book. Cat Wards writing is phenomenal. I don't know how she does it. I had to read this one slowly because I needed to concentrate on what was going on, and I didn't want to get confused. The book starts with Wilder Harlow starting his last book. A memoir about the summer that he and his family went to spend the summer at his late uncle's cottage on the coast of Maine. He tells about the two friends he met that summer, the killer called "The Dagger Man" that stalked the town, and the horrors they encountered that summer. While writing this book, Wilder starts to feel like he's losing his grip on reality. While reading this one, you will start to question which parts are the memoir and what is real life. It's actually pretty crazy….but in a fun way. You start to think WTH is going on. But that's how her last book was for me too. And in the same way, at the end…it all come together. Something about her books make you feel like you could read them again to see what clues you missed. Such an entertaining book.

Out August 8.

Thank you to the publisher and netgalley for the gifted copy. All opinions are my own. My review will be posted on Instagram, Bookbub, Goodreads, and Amazon once it publishes.