Little Lovely Things by Maureen Joyce Connolly @MConnollyAuthor

Norma’s review

Heart-wrenching, authentic, & compelling!

LITTLE LOVELY THINGS by MAUREEN JOYCE CONNOLLY is a steadily-paced, gripping, dramatic, raw, enigmatic, and dark suspenseful psychological thriller that deeply affected me. This heartbreaking story totally consumed my thoughts and my heart. I was fully engaged right from the very start and my mind didn’t even waver once while I was reading this book.

MAUREEN JOYCE CONNOLLY delivers an intense, well-crafted, believable, and beautifully written story here with absolutely fascinating, complex, and well-portrayed characters. I am not normally a fan of an overly descriptive writing style but I thought the descriptions here were absolutely beautiful and something to savour. Initially though I’d say that I did need to get into the flow of the narrative though and once I did it totally settled down for me and I was able to be fully absorbed in this story.

I absolutely loved Jay’s character and thought that the addition of his Native American folklore was fascinating and added in this extra layer of intrigue and mystery to the storyline.

Brenda’s review

Sometimes we make choices, and sometimes life chooses for us, and we are left to pick up the pieces. Little Lovely Things explores a bit of both here while exploring grief, loss and guilt after a devastation twist of fate shatter a family. It is a beautiful and insightful story that is devasting yet hopeful. Claire’s chance decision that left her family shattered had me thinking about how sometimes life throws us the unthinkable and what we do with that creates the story we must live.

As lovely and lyrical the writing it, I did find it distracting from connecting to the story on more of the emotional level I wanted. However, this is a personal thing as a reader and I still highly recommend this one.

Norma’s Stats:
Cover: A relevant, fitting, effective, palpable, and intriguingly obscure representation to storyline.
Title: Intriguing, palpable, worrisome, obscure, and a fantastic representation to storyline.
Writing/Prose: Well-written, gripping, descriptive, beautiful, and suspenseful.
Plot: Tragic, mysterious, suspenseful, believable, obscure, entertaining, captivating, intense, dark, distressing, emotional, and steadily-paced.
Ending: An unforgettable, hopeful, moving, emotional, and satisfying end that absolutely wrecked me and left me in a blubbering mess!
Overall: Such a tragic but yet hopeful story! I highly recommend it!

Thank you so much to Maureen Joyce Connolly for our gifted copies!

From Goodreads

A mother’s chance decision leads to a twist of fate that is every parent’s worst nightmare.

Claire Rawlings, mother of two and medical resident, will not let the troubling signs of an allergic reaction prevent her from making it in for rounds. But when Claire’s symptoms overpower her while she’s driving into work, her two children in tow, she must pull over. Moments later she wakes up on the floor of a gas station bathroom-her car, and her precious girls have vanished.

The police have no leads and the weight of guilt presses down on Claire as each hour passes with no trace of her girls. All she has to hold on to are her strained marriage, a potentially unreliable witness who emerges days later, and the desperate but unquenchable belief that her daughters are out there somewhere.

Little Lovely Things is the story of a family shattered by an unthinkable tragedy. Played out in multiple narrative voices, the novel explores how the lives of those affected fatefully intersect, and highlights the potential catastrophe of the small decisions we make every day.