In Beneath the Surface Fiona Neill really doesn't do much for Fenland tourism. It is grey and damp and very still. The Vermuyden family have been forced to move out of their beautiful flat in the middle of Cambridge because of some poor financial decisions by Patrick. Their new home is on a brand new estate on some reclaimed marshland out in the Fens. The new house is damp, mould stains the walls and their new start has had a very troubled start.

Wife Grace has very fixed ideas on what she thinks she needs to do for a perfect family life. She hasn't shared with anyone the full details of the horrific childhood that she shared with brother Luca. With no real experience of what a real family life is like she tries to protect her two daughters, Lily and Mia the best that she can.

Lily is one of the golden girls in her A level year. She's on target to go to Cambridge university, she's on the school swim team and has a large circle of friends. When she suddenly collapses in the middle of her English class no-one knows what is wrong with her. Grace is blaming the damp and the mould. Her friend's mother thinks it is a brain injury caused by the proximity of the nearby wind farm.

Ten year old Mia is old before her time and develops some strange and upsetting theories about what has happened in relation to the excavation of a nearby Anglo-Saxon settlement close to the dedicated Traveller's site.

This is essentially a story of a dysfunctional family and all of their secrets and lies. Patrick and Grace seem to spend most of their time hiding their real feelings from each other. Lily hides her boyfriend, her social life and her real feelings from her parents and sister. Mia is almost on an Aspergers spectrum, super smart but unable to relate facts to the potential pain that they might be causing. In many ways she is the real highlight of the story, exceptionally bright, cheeky and intensely concerned for her sister and her friend.

For me it didn't really delve deep enough beneath the surface but it is a good slow burner read that eventually reveals itself to be a little gem.

Supplied by Net Galley and Michael Joseph in exchange for an honest review. <

Lily is the perfect child destined for Cambridge university. Then an event happens at school. This leads to wild rumours around the Fens. Her younger sister Mia has her own problems.
Mum Grace has a history and Dad Patrick has his own secrets.
As their lives begin to unravel can this family save themselves.
At times this was a hard read and the characters hard to get into. However, this is a wonderfully written book with a good story line

Lily is a clever 17 year old girl headed for university top of the class superb at swimming and generally living her life the best she can with overbearing parents and a rather imaginative little sister Mia
Until during an English lesson she has what appears to be a fit and then during her extensive hospital stay her family starts to unravel
Her dad is in so much debt but won't tell Grace her mum as she overreacts to everything
, they have moved to this new build home on the fens that is falling apart
Grace is hiding her past as she doesn't want to be judged
Their lives are falling apart it can't get worse can it?

I enjoyed this book, and fell in love with ten year old Mia. Mia hasn’t exactly been diagnosed, but she’s definitely different, and definitely a very bright little girl.
Her family is dysfunctional, Mum and Dad don’t have a great relationship, and Dad is up to his neck in debt, which Mum is unaware of. They are living in a house he can’t afford, and which needs so much work doing to make it properly habitable. Mia’s elder sister Lilly works hard at school and gets good grades - until she gets a boyfriend.
It’s difficult to explain this book as there are so many secrets in this family, and it would spoil it for the reader if I mentioned more of them.
It’s an unusual book, but well worth reading.

I enjoyed this book up to a point but I thought that the bones of the story was a little flimsy. I also thought it was a little too long and while it was well written the first half was a little slow and there was a lot of unnessessary repetitive detail which could have been edited down. Ultimately I felt the reveal at the end was quite weak and the pay-off was not worth the time invested in reading up to that point and was a bit disappointing for me,

Quite an interesting book, but it lost a point for various reasons.
1) the rather abrupt ending. I'm sure the author would be mad about this, as I can see why it would have been done like that, and there was indeed impact. However, there were so many threads left untied that an epilogue would have been nice.
2) I find a book has more meaning to me if I care about any of the characters. I know they all needed to be complex for the story to work, but would we all really have minded if the ending 'had taken all three'?
3) The plot was a very slow-burner, so although it was interesting, to a degree, and also well-written, parts of it were just slow and a bit annoying.
However, having had that moan, I can say that I did enjoy it to a reasonable extent, and I'm sure there are many people who would enjoy it more than me. The author certainly did a good job of highlighting the oppressive landscape.

This was a very sad story about a mother who had a very fractured childhood and over compensates with her own children. A very dramatic conclusion and an absorbing read

This is the first novel I have read by Fiona Neill. ‘Beneath the Surface’ is set in The Fens, which is why I was originally drawn to the novel, as I spent the first twenty years of my life living there. It could have been set anywhere really and the ‘marshland reclaiming the land’ seemed to be the reason the badly built house was falling down. Some of the descriptions of The Fens were realistic but there was nothing about what a truly amazing place it is.

The storyline is about a dysfunctional family and their lives and how secrets and lies can surface when you least expect them to and the different ways this can show itself. Patrick and Grace, together with their two daughters, Lilly who is seventeen and Mia who is ten, have moved to the Fens for financial reasons.

Lilly, who is highly intelligent collapses at school and is thought to have had a seizure. This sets in motion a series of unexpected discoveries and nobody is who they appear to be. Mia, who has a vivid imagination, is the ‘problem’ child and some of her comments did have me snorting with laughter, even though I probably wasn’t supposed to. I did think that the animal cruelty could have been left out.

Multiple layers of dysfunction begin to emerge as the storyline progresses and there is some underling menace, which I couldn’t quite out my finger on.

Thank you to NetGalley, Penguin UK, Michael Joseph and Fiona Neill for my ARC in return for my honest review.

Interesting read. Recommended.

Beneath the Surface , a story of a dysfunctional family, wasn’t as gripping as I would have liked. It was interesting and extremely well written there’s no question about that but I found myself losing interest at times. I can’t honestly say why this was ,although I sometimes felt there was too much unnecessary detail which may sound an odd thing to say , but I found myself drifting and losing concentration., I think that perhaps this one just wasn’t one for me, no detriment to Ms Neill or her storytelling, simply the wrong genre for my taste.

The subtitle of this novel says s it all: Everyone Lies. This is a totally dysfunctional family with a mother,Grace,who subconsciously visits her own undisclosed traumatic early years onto her two daughters in the hope of doing better by them than her family did by her. The younger daughter Mia lives in a world of her own. She is either mischievous or malevolent. The book deals well with the traumas of adolescence for the older daughter and with the angst of relationships with her peers. There are references to sexual abuse,bullying, and academic pressure all of which enrich the book because of the way they are handled. It is an unusual achievement.

This book was good....I absolutely adored Mia as a character, young and a pain in the butt behind her perfect older sister Lilly. She was just the right amount of cute :) I wasn't keen on the adults in the book...too many secrets and lies and just not very nice people.
Some parts of the story were totally engrossing whilst I struggled with other parts as it was quite slow. The book also leaves you wondering about certain bits...no spoilers....and that made the ending quite flat, it felt like it just stopped? I may have missed something somewhere as I enjoyed a previous book by this author....but this one? I loved the way the story was heading and it's worth checking out.

This book was a bit of a slow burner and unfortunately failed to keep me interested for the most part. I loved the character of Mia, but she was the only highlight of the story. The book is well written with a complex domestic setting, but just lacked pace and then the ending seemed rather abrupt. Not my favourite.

I really enjoyed this book. It has a different feel to it than other books I have read. Quite a dark story yet it has glimmers of light.

My only pause for thought with this book is I found the end disappointing.

Grace, a mother with a troubled childhood wants her daughter to fell nothings of that pain and suffering and grow up as overachievers. She is blessed with two daughters- Mia, the mischievous, eccentric kid who always lands right in the middle of trouble, and Lilly- the perfect child, with good grades and best manners.

But Grace can be overbearing at times and one day when Lilly mysteriously collapses during school, hushed secrets take turns. While Lilly is recovering, we get to know that keeping secrets comes naturally to this family. Grace has a secret to protect, whereas her husband Patrick has a different kind of a mess.

Being a character-driven book, we are given enough information to empathize with each character and that helps build a connection with them. Even though this book isn’t relatable, I understood the circumstance and the choices each character made.

The heart of the story is Mia- with her eccentricity and chirpy and sometimes improper statements. She isn’t paid much attention to and her view of the world is mostly amusing. The problem is that the author doesn’t tie all the loose strings up at the ends. I have unanswered questions and they bother me so very much.

While the concept of the story is pretty mainstream, the characters bring the situation to life. The words felt a bit burdensome at times and slowed me down immensely, especially the first 30%. But the story picks up soon after that and it’s all good.

‘Beneath the Surface’ is how secrets can cause irreparable damage to her family. It’s mysterious, slow-paced and enjoyable.

This was a really good read exploring the lives, histories and problems of a contemporary Cambridgeshire nuclear family. Patrick is a teacher. His hours have been cut but he hasn't fully shared his financial problems with his wife Grace. Grace is a very anxious mother, desperate that her daughters, Lilly and Mia, will have all the opportunities she missed. Lilly is a model daughter, academically successful and popular. When she suddenly has an unexplained seizure at school things start to go wrong for everyone in the family, particularly 10 year old Mia. Mia is frequently in trouble at school due partly to her fertile imagination but also to her misguided attempts to put things right.
The relationships between the family members and between the individuals and their peers are very well crafted, particularly those fickle teenage friendships of Lilly and her classmates. The landscape and weather patterns of the fens are beautifully described and an important part of the tale. Layers of secrets are peeled away to explain behaviour patterns. Like the damp in the family home it seems that the damages of the past will take a lot of time and effort to heal.

This is a brilliant five star modern family story. I really enjoyed it and couldn't put it down. I loved the individual input from all the main character's which all came together beautifully.

Beneath the Surface is a potent mix of psychological thriller and domestic/family drama, and once again Ms Neill has crafted an utterly breathtaking read. You may have guessed from the somewhat enigmatic title that the story concerns secrets, lies and skeletons in the closet just waiting for the perfect time to reveal themselves, and you would be right! The reason I enjoyed it so much is that there are so many different facets to it with each coming together to create a tense, nail-biting tale and one you will abandon life in favour of. The gossip that ensues when teenager Lilly unexpectedly collapses has the locals theorising about what has happened to her and why. You can feel the desperation and pressure felt by all involved to get to the truth of the matter. The way Neill keeps the cards close to her chest means we are never sure where this is heading.

We watch as the Vermuyden family attempt to deal with everyday problems but they are all quite annoying as they act in ways that become increasingly frustrating to the reader. Grace lives her life through her daughter Lilly and is completely consumed by paranoia, her husband, Patrick, is the eternal optimist who sits back while debt mounts and mounts and teenage daughter Lilly probably behaves the most normal. She's rather selfish and there's increasing evidence that she's been leading a secret life. You do, however, warm to them and the reason they act the way they do is revealed later on. The vivid descriptions of the beautiful, vast surroundings of the Fens is my favourite part, though, and you can tell that the author knows this area well. Many thanks to Michael Joseph for an ARC.

Oooo what an ending. Chaotic yet satisfying yet not satisfying at all - I want more! But I'm getting ahead of myself.

I very much enjoyed this book. As I've said before, I am a huge fan of original books that surprise me, either by the writing, the choice of protagonist, or hundreds of other reasons. This one hit the nail on the head with a great choice of protagonists. We flit between four members of a family, each with their own secrets and plans (hint: everything really is Beneath the Surface) and its astonishing to see how they view each other.

I vehemently enjoyed how secrets turned to lies then turned to consequences. I didn't see some things coming, and I certainly was in the dark about some of the mysteries from the very beginning. I love Mia as a protagonist, and how her logic seems perfectly reasonable for all her decisions, in a way that makes you forget she is 10 years old and shouldn't need to be making such choices. It really makes you understand her as a person and her relationships with her family.

I also like how things seem to come full circle, and how the parents past lives influence their current ones. There is a symmetry between them and their daughters which is incredibly intruiging. I also like how there are so many different stories going on, but I never seemed to get confused or lost. It was chaotic without being chaotic, which was great to read.

The only criticism I would have is that the ending didn't tie everything up in neat bows the way you'd like, but after giving it more thought, real life isn't tied in neat bows and it made the story feel more realistic.

4/5 stars!

I thought this was an excellent book. It is about, more than anything, relationships. Between the individual members of a family and their wider peer groups. The context, the home built in the Fens which is suffering from severe damp problems serves as a great background to the story. I found the way Grace reacted to the world around her which stemmed from her own background (careful not to spoil here) to be fascinating. I thought all the characters were well drawn and well developed and I liked the ending.

Having read great reviews for this book, I was looking forward to reading it, but found it really slow. I ended up reading out of duty to the publishers who had provided me with an advance copy. Although I usually like this genre of books, it wasn't for me but reading other reviews I am in the minority. I'm sure an awful lot of people will enjoy it.