The Longest Night of Your Life, and More: Don’t You Cry by Cass Green @carolinesgreen @HarperCollinsUK @HarperFiction

Happy Monday!!!

… Those words don’t go well together, don’t you think? I’m team ‘I hate Mondays’. But to make it better, I’m posting the review of a book I couldn’t put down!

I would like to thank Harper Collins UK for providing me with a copy of Don’t You Cry in exchange for an honest review.

Title: Don’t You Cry
Author: Cass Green
Date of publication: 2018
Publisher: Harper Collins UK
Format: e-copy
Rating: 🧚‍♀️🧚‍♀️🧚‍♀️🧚‍♀️🧚‍♀️

Remember the old « at the wrong place at the wrong time »? It is exactly what happens to Nina. A big ball of wrongs which will turn her life upside down and make her think twice about what you say to strangers. I know I will!!!

A blind date is already bad enough, but when the night ends up at your house for a sentence taken literally, you might want to stay home for a while! Nina only meant well when she thanked the waitress who saved her from choking at the restaurant. Never had she imagined that this same person would later appear at her door with a gun and no explanation. Nor that a baby and a man would join them in what will be Nina’s longest night.

This sounds like a good movie plot, doesn’t it? But if it were a movie, we would miss the spotless and spot-on characterization from Cass Green, the careful attention to detail to make every protagonist flesh and bone. They all get to talk, we get to jump inside their heads with each chapter and it feels like a camera changing angle. I just ADORED being the fly jumping from one side to the other because I could feel there was more than met the eye, though I had no idea how right I was.

More than your usual adrenaline-inducing psychological thriller, Don’t You Cry is an unputdownable (I know, this word is overused and awful to write, but trust me!) and addictive novel about survival, parenthood, and demons from the past. But it doesn’t stop there. As the story unfolded, my perception of colors turned all funny. No black and white, good and bad, normal or weird people. Don’t You Cry is a mash-up of grey with a big threatening shadow. Except your idea of the shadow evolves as you read about the lives of Nina, Lucas, Angel (The latter name will forever be linked to Buffy the Vampire Slayer to me, so I had a hard time imagining a woman wearing it! Damn brain!)

I admired Nina the most. Stuck in a situation she didn’t see coming, kidnapped in her own house, a single mother fighting with her own life having been torn apart by her ex-husband when he decided to leave, she proved to be an extraordinary ‘normal’ main character. No big muscle, no acts of bravery, just a woman dealing with cards she didn’t ask for. I had no issues putting myself in her shoes and her reactions felt so perfectly in sync with what I was thinking or how I think I would have reacted that I couldn’t NOT root for her.

It took me longer than I thought to realize there was more to the night than a baby coming out of nowhere, a lone guy and his sister with a scary gun. They too have a story to tell and oh my, what story! This is where Don’t You Cry takes a 360-degree turn and races through a completely different level to me. Oh, the tension kept ratcheting, the sky still felt ominous, even when the reader is expected to believe things will get better. If you are a crime fiction lover, you know they rarely do get better but I was frankly marvelously surprised at where Cass Green took her story to for the last part of the book. What a brilliant idea! She colors the grey, she adds some crimson, and she makes sure your previously clear view of the events is put under a different filter, letting you in on a perspective that gives you an entirely new puzzle!

I can’t express how refreshing, fantastic, and utterly frightening Don’t You Cry is. I devoured it like cake, each layer tastier than the last!

You can get a copy on Amazon!