Sundial By Catriona Ward
Well… where do I even start? It’s always harder to write a review about a book that I don’t like than the ones that I do like. I have had Sundial by Catriona Ward on my TBR for actual years. Whenever I walked by my bookshelf on the way to the kitchen, I thought about picking up the book for my next read. Whenever I’m going through my TBR on Goodreads, it stares at me in the f*^&$ing face. I can practically hear it in my head yelling, “Pick me! Choose me! Love me!” I finally gave in, and well… I should’ve just stayed curious.
What to expect
Child neglect
Animal experimenting/ abuse/ neglect
Mass murder
Drug addiction
Toxic parents
Human abuse and experimentation
Mind manipulation
The premise of the book is super interesting. However, the characters, not so much. Is it because it's a horror/thriller book, that it's required to have extremely unlikeable and abusive main characters? Sigh, I digress. The story follows the main character, Rob, a housewife experiencing an extreme midlife crisis. She has two daughters and a real POS husband. Rob is very in tune with her surroundings. She figured out that her husband of many years has been cheating on her for the entirety of their marriage. Now, you might be thinking to yourself, “Is this another wife who kills her husband to save the kids?”. You’re kind of right… But not exactly. Callie, who is a cute twelve-year-old little girl, seems to like collecting tiny bones and talking to her two ghost friends. One is named Dumpster Puppy, which is very fitting because she found his bones and body outside the dumpster. And the other ghost is called pale Callie… yeah, you can figure that one out.
Rob knows there’s something very dark about her oldest daughter, Callie. For some reason, Rob thinks it’s a cute idea to take Callie to her childhood home in the desert, Sundial. I must say I was a little disappointed to find out that the book is all about Rob’s past and not so much about Callie. When Callie and Rob get to Sundial, Rob starts speaking about her past and enters a very entranced state. tiny spoiler, Sundial seems to hold a very scary past. It seems like Rob was involved in a serious Cult. Rob and her sister Jack were raised by a group of hippies they called their parents. These people were conducting very interesting experiments (TW for animal abuse), think of MKUltra x cosmetic animal testing. Rob is explaining her past to Callie in a way that she is trying to convey a message. Something like “You can’t escape what’s in your blood”.
I rated this book three stars: for the scenery description and the good plot twists. I thought I could figure it out, but Catriona Ward did a good job of making sure I couldn’t. The reason I didn’t rate it higher was because of the slightly misleading plot, and also the trigger warnings. I don’t like to read about animal abuse, I mean, who does? It would’ve been nice to know that. The toxicity of the two parents was hard to get past as well. It was overdone and honestly gross. Reading the book to the end, I understand why this was, but still, I could’ve done without the mental torture.
