Mice

June 27, 2011
Early on in Reece's disappointing first novel, a predictable psychological thriller, bullies attack shy, unpopular Shelley Rivers in the girls' bathroom at her London secondary school, setting her hair on fire with a cigarette lighter. After Shelley gets out of the hospital, her recently divorced mother, Elizabeth, withdraws her from school, and they move to Honeysuckle Cottage, a remote country property bought with Elizabeth's share of the divorce settlement from her stock cad of a husband. At first, everything is looking up: Shelley's former school arranges for tutors so she can prepare for her exams, and Elizabeth throws herself into her job at a law office. But their peace is shattered in the early morning of Shelley's 16th birthday when a burglar breaks into the cottage. The violent repercussions force Shelley and Elizabeth to question how far they're willing to go to protect the new life they've built. While bullying is a hot topic, much of the plot relies too heavily on known genre tropes and coincidence.

August 1, 2011

Victims, pushed to their limits, turn aggressors in a starkly polarized debut thriller.

There's no mistaking the villains in Australia-based Reece's black-and-white story of cold-eyed, remorseless schoolgirl bullies; suave, vindictive, philandering husbands; and greasy, smelly, drug-pushing burglars. Nor the heroes either: Clever English schoolgirl Shelley and her equally smart mother Elizabeth are the endlessly meek "mice" who have lived through a chapter of horrors and recently moved into a remote new home to start afresh. Elizabeth's divorce has stripped her of money and forced her into a job where she is overworked and underpaid. Shelley, bright but innocent, has seen her friends turn violently against her, their final attack landing her in the hospital, burned and scarred. Rebuilding their lives in Honeysuckle Cottage, the women begin to rediscover contentment until a thief breaks in and unleashes their repressed anger, setting off an escalating sequence of bloodshed. Reece has a strong visual sense and does a neat job of ratcheting the tension, but a shortage of subtlety and Shelley's histrionic adolescent narration create an overall mood of near-comic caricature.

Mice roar and worms turn in a bare-bones moral fable that, despite visceral episodes, creates little impact.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

March 15, 2011

"We were mice, after all. We weren't looking for a home. We were looking for a place to hide." Teenaged Shelley is being bullied, her mom is newly divorced, and they've fled to a remote cottage. Then an unwanted guest arrives. Debut novelist Reece, born in the UK and currently living in Australia, has published several illustrated children's books but is now trying out adult fiction. A pretty big push from the publisher, and I'm intrigued.

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

July 1, 2011
When the intruder infiltrates their isolated country home, 16-year-old Shelley and her mother are already at their breaking points. Accurately described in Shelley's first-person narration as mice, the two have been a study in meekness. Her mother retreated from a bad divorce to a humiliating job, while Shelley chose home schooling to escape from the high-school tormentors who nearly murdered her. So when the junkie burglar tries to take advantage of them, something snaps, and they kill him. I think we should bury him in the garden, says the mother. Anyone who has seen an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents knows the exquisite pleasures of what followspotentially ruinous overlooked details (the burglar's cell phone was buried with him) and stressful little scenes of noticing a piece of evidence (a bloody handprint) while having to pretend everything is swell. Reece wrings these set pieces for all they're worth and gets inside the heads of his antiheroines to the point where we, too, begin to expand the definition of justifiable self-defense.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)