Blog Tour Review: All These Perfect Strangers by Aoife Clifford
Conflicting evidence, an unreliable narrator and a morally ambigious story make All These Perfect Strangers one of the most intriguing novels that I have encountered so far in 2016. Pen Sheppard is an unwelcome resident in her small town, and has recently left university under a dark cloud. The novel opens with Pen visiting her psychiatrist, before moving between the past and the present to tell of Pen's unusual--and traumatic--experiences at university, while also addressing the reason that Pen is hated by nearly everyone in her small town. The story is so complex that I found my feelings toward Pen ebb back and forth several times throughout the narrative. On the surface, it is a story about a young woman who is in the wrong place at the wrong time, suffers a trauma, is ostracised by the people in her home town and then lucky enough to win the perfect escape a scholarship to a university ... where she is unlucky enough to find herself in the middle of a situation that is ...