Sundial by Catriona Ward – ARC Review

Sundial by Catriona Ward

Series: N/A

Publisher: Viper

Published March 10th 2022

Genres: Thriller

Pages: 352

Format: ARC

Buy: Book Depository / Amazon

* Received this copy from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Thank you very much! This doesn’t affect the review in any way. My opinions are, as always, my own.*

You can’t escape the desert. You can’t escape Sundial.

Rob fears for her daughters. For Callie, who collects tiny bones and whispers to imaginary friends. For Annie, because she fears what Callie might do to her. Rob sees a darkness in Callie, one that reminds her of the family she left behind. She decides to take Callie back to her childhood home, to Sundial, deep in the Mojave Desert. And there she will have to make a terrible choice.

Callie is afraid of her mother. Rob has begun to look at her strangely. To tell her secrets about her past that both disturb and excite her. And Callie is beginning to wonder if only one of them will leave Sundial alive…

From the bestselling author of The Last House on Needless Streetcomes a stunning thriller exploring the toxicity of the mother-daughter bond, and the power of the past to twist the present.

This is about a woman named Rob. She is married with two children and on the surface everything seems normal. But the family is extremely dysfunctional. When Rob fears that her older daughter, Callie, is not normal, she fears for her life.

Rob and Callie take a trip to Sundial, where Rob grew up. Sundial has a dark and disturbing history… one Rob hoped she left behind forever. But the past has a hold on her family that won’t budge.

This has been quite a ride. I loved the past of Sundial. The narrative is divided between past and present, which sometimes I tend not to like. But in this case it works perfectly.

The story was hard and difficult to read because… big trigger warning for animals – dogs in special- being experimented on. There’s a lot of hard moments if you are sensitive to that, I wouldn’t recommend it. But it’s definitely interesting!

The pace was overall quite slow even tho it had a lot of interesting things happening. It made it a bit more difficult to fly through it.

Sundial has a unique atmosphere tho, it was super cool to read about it. I couldn’t guess the end at all! There’s so many twists and turns, and it’s creepy and stressful.

Absolutely love the end. You just learn to be incredibly into knowing what the family is going through – it’s far from a normal family, and you couldn’t believe all of what’s happening and has happened to them. And the end just grips you. And overall, it was an interesting and fun read. Also Callie is the most unreliable character I’ve read about in a while. But she is not the only one!