A review by erinbarton
Sundial by Catriona Ward

dark mysterious tense medium-paced

1.5

i have never felt more catfished by a blurb in my entire life

while it is technically correct that some of the plot revolves around rob fearing her daughter callie, and her and callie travelling to their desert property, this is definitely not representative of the story. a more accurate description would be:

rob is trapped in a toxic marriage with her husband, irving. they have two young daughters, callie and annie. rob views annie as an angelic golden child, and struggles to connect to the precocious and seemingly troubled callie, who irving has manipulated to act out against rob. when rob fears callie wants to hurt her sister annie, rob takes callie to her childhood home in the desert, sundial, and recounts her  traumatic childhood growing up and being raised by hippy parents who carried out scientific experiments on dogs. 

i enjoyed the first 100 pages of this and was decently interested in the family dynamic and especially callie’s character. initially this was reminiscent of another family-centred psychological thriller which i had read and loved: sharp objects by gillian flynn. however, when the flashbacks to the past timeline began i really lost interest. the plot took such a bizarre turn and was from then on majority flashback of rob’s past. because of this, it quickly became clear that chapters from callie’s pov served no purpose other than to break up the super long account of rob’s past

i thought the whole concept of the genetically modified dog experiments were ridiculous, and the reveal that rob and jack had also had the same genetic experiment carried out on them because they had a “killer” gene was even more stupid. the book had even more twists/reveals after this all more stupid than the last: rob and jack were adopted as toddlers and had killed their birth mum after being locked in cages their entire lives up til then, callie can for some unexplained but also irrelevant reason see ghosts (and this is never once relevant to the plot), and the final reveal, annie was really the “evil” child all along and callie was simply trying to stop annie from hurting other people. all of these were beyond the realm of suspended disbelief and just lead to more questions. how did rob as a malnourished four year old manage to take her mother by surprise and physically overpower her enough to strangle her? why could callie see ghosts when there are no other paranormal elements involved in the book? how does a 9 year old annie have the cognitive and social development to convincingly manipulate every adult around her? just feels like the author threw a lot of shit at the wall to see what stuck and in fact none of it did <\spoiler>
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