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A review by kba76
How to Play Dead by Jacqueline Ward
3.0
Ria is a driven character, yet she does the very things she warns the women she works with not to do. This is a little frustrating, and her background story also showed she was as much a victim as the women she works with which also made me feel the story-lines/ideas merged just a little too conveniently at times.
As one of the workers at SafeMe, a refuge for women fleeing domestic abuse, Ria is used to hearing some awful stories. She is used to waiting for someone to feel safe enough to tell the truth of their experience. Some of these stories are worse than others, but they all have something in common...a man determined to control those around him, by whatever means necessary.
Alongside Ria’s story - which focuses on the day-to-day running of the refuge, the realities of life with two kids and what could best be described as a campaign of harassment - we have journal entries from a character known as Tanya. Until we see how the stories link, this voice was hard to follow - Tanya sounded like a story from the past and this made it even more difficult to understand how she’d found herself in this scenario.
Few of the characters in this were remotely likeable, perhaps to be expected. The story itself felt like a number of elements pulled together in a way that didn’t quite work. It’s a topic that many won’t - thankfully - have to think about, and it made me angry to see how these situations are dealt with.
Much as we might wring our hands, everyone who sees it and does nothing is part of the problem. I’m pleased I read it, and grateful to NetGalley for the opportunity to do so, but it wasn’t enjoyable.
As one of the workers at SafeMe, a refuge for women fleeing domestic abuse, Ria is used to hearing some awful stories. She is used to waiting for someone to feel safe enough to tell the truth of their experience. Some of these stories are worse than others, but they all have something in common...a man determined to control those around him, by whatever means necessary.
Alongside Ria’s story - which focuses on the day-to-day running of the refuge, the realities of life with two kids and what could best be described as a campaign of harassment - we have journal entries from a character known as Tanya. Until we see how the stories link, this voice was hard to follow - Tanya sounded like a story from the past and this made it even more difficult to understand how she’d found herself in this scenario.
Few of the characters in this were remotely likeable, perhaps to be expected. The story itself felt like a number of elements pulled together in a way that didn’t quite work. It’s a topic that many won’t - thankfully - have to think about, and it made me angry to see how these situations are dealt with.
Much as we might wring our hands, everyone who sees it and does nothing is part of the problem. I’m pleased I read it, and grateful to NetGalley for the opportunity to do so, but it wasn’t enjoyable.