The Playdate

Starred review from May 21, 2012
British author Millar’s engrossing debut offers an unsettling, realistic view of friendships, gossip, and loneliness. Suzy Howard and Callie Roberts, who live on the same London street, appear to be best friends. They share child-care duties, and the affluent, obsessive Suzy often subsidizes their outings. The other neighborhood women have pointedly ignored Callie, a single mother who barely scrapes by and whose five-year-old daughter has a heart condition. When Callie decides to return to work, she hesitates to tell Suzy of her new job, causing a rift between them. A new neighbor, Debs Ribwell, a teacher with a dark history and fragile mental health, further jeopardizes their friendship. The narration shifts among the three women, slowly revealing the secrets that bind and alienate them. Despite all the time spent together, Suzy and Callie don’t really know each other, and the consequences put their children in peril. What starts as a quiet story about neighbors soon builds into a gripping psychological thriller.

Starred review from July 1, 2012
Truth is elusive in this taut psychological thriller about three women under stress in a London neighborhood. Narrator Callie is a never-married single mother struggling alone to raise her somewhat fragile daughter, Rae, who was born with a heart condition. Her only ally among the mums of children at Rae's primary school is her across-the-street neighbor Suzy, an American worried about the fidelity of her English businessman husband, whose oldest son is Rae's classmate. The equilibrium of Callie and Suzy's close relationship is upset first when Callie, a talented sound engineer, goes back to work for the first time since Rae's birth. Things are further exacerbated between the two women when middle-aged Debs, who has what seems a dreadful incident in her past involving children yet helps at the after-school club that Rae enters, and her new husband move in next door to Suzy. A shocking secret is revealed partway through the narrative, but only after the climactic finish are all facts laid bare. Millar's well-drawn characters and impeccably structured plot instantly grab the reader and may leave parents wondering who to trust with their children. A supremely accomplished debut thriller by a writer to watch.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)