Twenty years ago six year old Arden Maynor from Widow Hills, Kentucky was swept away during a bad storm, her mother Laurel believed she had been sleepwalking. Three days later, she was found underground and clinging to a drain cover by Sean Coleman. She was injured but alive. The media go wild and her mother spoke freely to them over the years which was quite lucrative. Fast forward twenty years and Arden has changed her name to Olivia Meyer, she’s working as a hospital administrator in Central Valley, N Carolina. This is her story which backtracks through various sources to the incident that made her and her mother famous and in the present day where a series of terrible events occur which places Olivia and in danger but through this she learns her truth.

I like the way Olivia’s story is told as it’s tense, creepy, mysterious, intriguing and terrifying at times. She is ultimately a survivor, she’s stronger and braver than she realises as she’s had to put up with judgements, assumptions, jealousy and threats. She has trouble at times separating fact from fiction, the real memories from the false, and her state of confusion and lack of trust is well conveyed. She has lived with subterfuge, secrecy and lies since she was a little girl and this would mess with anyone’s reality. The story is full of twists, revelations and events that cause her to shutdown and panic at times. The ending is one I genuinely didn’t see coming and kudos to Megan Miranda for that!

However, there is some repetition especially in the telling of Arden’s story and the pace in the middle is a bit slow although the last quarter of the book makes up for that.

Overall, it’s a well written book, with interesting characters and an intriguing storyline which I enjoyed.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Atlantic Books for the ARC.

This was a book I randomly picked and I absolutely LOVED it, I couldn't put it down and it's a good thing we are in lockdown otherwise I would've been super tired at work. The main character Olivia was extremely likable and I thought it was genius how the author let us in on how people who had that sort of back story really feal.
It is so true! I realised whilst reading it that we do get invested in people like Olivia and we do want to know that they ended up having a good life and that there is some meaning to it all.
What I never thought about is how people like Olivia must feel with the intrusion we constantly want into their lives, especially on bit anniversay dates.
One of the things that really surprised me was the ending, I did not see it coming which is unuasal for me. I will 100% be buying her books

Megan Miranda has once again delivered a great story

The book is a slow burn, things happen and it is all very tense and eerie. However, the ending is anything but that! I greatly enjoyed reading this and would recommend it!

The Girl from Widow Hills is an incredible tale of Olivia who found fame as a child in a tragic accident.

I don’t think I can say much more without giving away parts of the plot. I must admit when I first started reading I thought this was a low star book. I found everything was obvious. It’s NOT! Stick with this and you will not regret.

Summer hit!

WOW. What a story. A thrilling 'whodunnit' with psychological twists, an underbelly of tales, mystery, lies, murder, and many suspicious characters both past and present. A thrilling cautionary tale that in a world of crazed media frenzy, book deals and national stories; your past may never leave you, no matter how you try to leave that chapter of your life behind.

Thank you to Atlantic Books and Netgalley for my free advanced reading copy of this book. My opinions within this review are entirely my own and not in anyway influenced by my gifting of this book.

It’s been a very long time since I’ve read a book until late at night, refusing to go to sleep because I needed to finish it and see the things finally unravel. This was my second Megan Miranda book and it took me completely off guard.

Somehow Megan Miranda created an engaging, intoxicating read that is impossible to put down. «The Girl from Widow Hills» doesn’t add anything new to thriller themes I’ve read before. [I’ve probably read too many thrillers and nothing can surprise me anymore]. However, it didn’t really matter because of the way it was written.

Yes, there were some twists that I predicted and there were twists that took me completely by surprise. But that wasn’t the strength of this book. Megan Miranda didn’t rely on twists to keep her readers at the edge of the seat, she relied on her writing, on creating strong emotions - fear, anger, confusion, that were able to escape the pages of the book right into the readers’ minds.

I honestly don’t remember the last time a book made me jumpy or the last time I was so engrossed in the story my own pulse went wild from the fictional events.

I can feel that this will be the book to vote for in Goodreads Choice Awards this year. This is my prediction, guys and I hope I’m right. I hope more people read and love it just as much as I did. Megan Miranda might become one of my favorite authors, and I’m definitely going to pick up more of her books in the future.

Thank you to Netgalley and Atlantic Books for this advanced reader's copy in return for my honest review. I loved last summer's The Last House Guest so I was delighted to have the opportunity to read this summer's thriller. This one will definitely be another big hit. A psychological whodunnit filled with twists. Read this over the weekend and couldn't put it down.

I would like to thank Netgalley and Atlantic Books for an advance copy of The Girl from Widow Hills, a stand-alone thriller set in the fictional town of Central Valley, South Carolina.

Olivia has changed her name and moved to Central Valley to escape her past because twenty years ago Olivia was Arden, the eponymous girl from Widow Hills, Kentucky who was missing for three days and was found in a storm drain. Now it seems Arden will be the story again when, sleepwalking, she stumbles over a dead body in her backyard.

I thoroughly enjoyed The Girl from Widow Hills which is a slow burning but compulsive thriller that mingles past events with present developments into a satisfying whole. No, it’s not entirely plausible but it’s told by Liv in the first person in such an enraging way that plausibility doesn’t matter. I liked the format, Liv’s narrative interspersed with snippets from events, like 911 calls, her mother’s book and newspaper articles.it puts her experiences in context and generally suggests that her narrative is reliable and true, insofar as she remembers. I think the conclusion is clever and I didn’t see it coming, but I was so caught up in the story that I didn’t have room to think about where it was going or who was doing what.

I really liked the overarching theme of the novel, the perniciousness of fame. Liv didn’t ask to be the girl from Widow Hills and has sought to avoid the limelight ever since but it seems that the public think they know her and everyone else wants a piece of her. It made me think and illustrated things I’d never thought of and it’s all just woven into the fabric of the novel. More cleverness.

I felt heart sorry for Liv. She’s a lonely person, holding herself and her secrets close and there’s reasons for that but it damages her friendships. I’m not sure that she fully understands what is happening to her in the present and she has no memory of what happened in the storm drain so she wanders about in a fog, a relatively clear sighted fog but still a fog. It’s fascinating.

The Girl from Widow Hills is a good read that I have no hesitation in recommending.

This was brilliant, a slow burn that ramped up. I was convinced several characters were the troublemaker when they were not!