The First Day of Spring: Discover the year’s most page-turning thriller

Product Information

Nevertheless, when Chrissie/Julia feels like the past is catching up to her present, she is terrified to lose the one person she loves. This book will NOT appeal to everyone, there are some serious topics which will trigger readers, so I will warn you now, it’s about child neglect and killings and is told through the voice of the child murderer. By the time we were close to town my church shoes were digging into my heels, but when I slowed down Mam yanked my arm to make me go faster. Mam’s perfume bottle was still in my room, sitting on the windowsill, and I took out the stopper, opened the window, and poured it into the rain.

A Young Murderer Grows Up, and Has a Child of Her Own

I wanted it to shatter into a million glittering pieces that would cut up Mam’s feet next time she went out barefoot, but it hit the path with a dull crack and bounced into the grass. Tucker follows one woman's reckoning with the quarantines of her childhood, seeking love amid dark secrets hiding in the nooks and crannies of all our lives. I read the synopsis for this one at least once a month all year, and only put it on my TBR list after I read some complimentary reviews.The mattress underneath was just as stained and rotten, but I stretched the blanket over it and pretended it was clean. This one didn't work for me, mainly because I couldn't reconcile the young character with the older version of herself. I thought Ann would leave me alone then, but she barged forward and pressed her stupid finger against the doorbell. After a few minutes I heard the front door close, heard Mam come back up the stairs and go back into her bedroom. What makes it even more difficult to digest is that you are seeing both the voices simultaneously and alternately.

The First Day of Spring: Discover the year’s most page The First Day of Spring: Discover the year’s most page

I am not ashamed to say that I felt my heart break for little Chrissie even though she seemed to show almost no remorse for her crimes… read between the lines in this story it truly shattered me. I don’t know what’s more disturbing: a child so off kilter she becomes a murderer; or a mum who is such a bitch you don’t need to wonder why the kid is so messed up.year old Chrissie has the most shocking of secrets, she has killed a 2 year old boy, strangling him, feeling a sense of excitement.

The First Day of Spring - The Gilmore Guide to Books The First Day of Spring - The Gilmore Guide to Books

At the same time, you also have to reconcile yourself to the fact that this same child has grown up to be Julia.Fast forward to another first day of spring, where we were introduced to the second narrator, an adult Chrissie, now twenty-five, with a young daughter of her own. In a multilayered narrative we learn of Chrissie's background of poverty, neglect and abuse, a mother that had never wanted her, leaving her starving and ignored, and a father that flitted in and out of her life, who could not care less for her either. Years later, there is Julia, an insecure single mother, who loves her young daughter, Molly, worrying about her capacity to provide a loving home and happy childhood, both of which she had no experience of in her early years. Her tongue licked at her bottom lip in a lizardy way, and she turned and pressed herself up against the desk to speak to Ann. As gripping as the tensest of thrillers and as moving and humane as the most intimate of memoirs, I loved this book.

The First Day of Spring ‹ Literary Hub The First Day of Spring ‹ Literary Hub

So much more to the reasons than are at first apparent, much going on in this girl's life that though one cannot in any way condone what she has done, I could not help but feel for her. Chrissie is living in a loveless home, with an abusive mother, barely any food on a regular basis and she is a pariah of her poor neighbourhood. But when she realises that there is someone waiting to take Molly away from her, she feels terrified and compelled to take a drastic action. Chilling, thought-provoking, and compulsively readable, The First Day of Spring is a novel that will break your heart on every page and never leave you.

If perhaps someone had done this for this poor little lamb she wouldn’t have turned into a murderer - nature vs nurture?