Review: The Uninvited by Liz Jensen

Title: The Uninvited

Author: Liz Jensen

Series: Nil

Publication Date: July 5th, 2012 (First Pub)

Publisher: Bloomsbury

Genre: Adult, Science Fiction, Thriller

Source: eARC provided by Bloomsbury via Netgalley

Description

A seven-year-old girl puts a nail-gun to her grandmother's neck and fires. An isolated incident, say the experts. The experts are wrong. Across the world, children are killing their families. Is violence contagious?

As chilling murders by children grip the country, anthropologist Hesketh Lock has his own mystery to solve: a bizarre scandal in the Taiwan timber industry. He has never been good at relationships. Asperger's Syndrome has seen to that. But he does have a talent for spotting behavioural patterns, and an outsider's fascination with group dynamics.

Nothing obvious connects Hesketh's Southeast Asian case with the atrocities back home. Or with the increasingly odd behaviour of his beloved step-son, Freddy. But when his Taiwan contact dies shockingly, and more acts of sabotage and child violence sweep the globe, Hesketh is forced to make connections that defy the rational principles on which he has staked his life, his career and - most devastatingly of all - his role as a father.

Part psychological thriller, part dystopian nightmare, The Uninvited is a powerful and viscerally unsettling portrait of apocalypse in embryo.

Review

I wanted to like this book so much. I was excited to read it. The title, the cover and the premise seem so creepy and I loved that. 
But I have been trying to read it for the past 4 months and I just can't. 

The first few pages were creepy and I thought the rest of the book would be like that, but then the story changed to Hesketh and some problem in Asia and I just didn't care anymore. It wasn't interesting and I found I dreaded the thought of trying to read any more of it. So, I give up.

Judging by the reviews on Goodreads I'm in the minority. While I wanted to love it,  I have so many good books waiting for me to read them that I just can't keep forcing myself to read the ones that aren't clicking with me. 

DNF
Didn't Finish It

Author Bio

Source

Liz Jensen was born in Oxfordshire, the daughter of a Danish father and an Anglo-Moroccan mother. She spent two years as a journalist in the Far East before joining the BBC, first as a journalist, then as a TV and radio producer. She then moved to France where she worked as a sculptor began her first novel, Egg Dancing, which was published in 1995. Back in London she wrote Ark Baby (1998) which was shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Award, The Paper Eater (2000), and War Crimes for the Home (2002) which was longlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction. She has two children and shares her life with the Danish essayist, travel writer and novelist Carsten Jensen.

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