Hey guys! Today, I’m sharing a review of the 2nd book in the The Family Upstairs series by Lisa Jewell. I reviewed The Family Upstairs back in November and I actually read this book shortly after finishing the first one, but I didn’t get around to writing the review for it.
While I say that The Family Remains is the second in the series, The Family Upstairs is actually pretty much a complete story and doesn’t need a sequel if you ask me. But I was curious to see where the story would go and how Jewell would wrap up some of the loose ends.
About the Book
Title: The Family Remains
Author: Lisa Jewell
Genre: Suspense, Psychological Thriller
Book Description:
From the #1 New York Times bestselling author Lisa Jewell comes an intricate and affecting novel about twisted marriages, fractured families, and deadly obsessions in this standalone sequel to The Family Upstairs.
Early one morning on the shore of the Thames, DCI Samuel Owusu is called to the scene of a gruesome discovery. When Owusu sends the evidence for examination, he learns the bones are connected to a cold case that left three people dead on the kitchen floor in a Chelsea mansion thirty years ago.
Rachel Rimmer has also received a shock—news that her husband, Michael, has been found dead in the cellar of his house in France. All signs point to an intruder, and the French police need her to come urgently to answer questions about Michael and his past that she very much doesn’t want to answer.
After fleeing London thirty years ago in the wake of a horrific tragedy, Lucy Lamb is finally coming home. While she settles in with her children and is just about to purchase their first-ever house, her brother takes off to find the boy from their shared past whose memory haunts their present.
As they all race to discover answers to these convoluted mysteries, they will come to find that they’re connected in ways they could have never imagined.
In this masterful standalone sequel to her haunting New York Times bestseller, The Family Upstairs, Lisa Jewell proves she is writing at the height of her powers with another jaw-dropping, intricate, and affecting novel about the lengths we will go to protect the ones we love and uncover the truth.
SPOILER WARNING — This is a sequel, so there WILL be spoilers below!
How Does it Compare to The Family Upstairs?
I enjoyed returning to the same cast of characters while reading The Family Remains. I really liked the complicated family dynamics and the back stories that Jewell set up in the first book and I think she does a great job of continuing them in a way that feels natural (but still surprises you at times.)
Henry, for instance, is a complicated character from the start. He’s a sweet boy who is also fiercely protective of the people around him. In The Family Upstairs, we often see him as the only one to stand up to the adults for the injustices that are taking place. But he’s also sometimes seen as the perpetrator. In the first book, he uses his love of botany to poison his parents, Phin/Finn, and the other adults in the home. He goes throughout the story with this constant question mark over his head. Is he evil? Is he the good guy? Is he a murderer but it’s acceptable because the people he killed deserved to die? There is a lot of tension between Henry and Phin throughout the entire first book and in this book, we see Henry still obsessing over Phineas. I will say that the ending to their story did feel a little anticlimactic. It was almost like any time the author needed to explain away two people knowing each other, she conveniently made them bisexual. Then she built up the sexual tension around the bisexual characters and literally everyone around them. Which felt a little odd, since I don’t think being bisexual necessarily means you are just wildly sex crazed all the time. Anyway, I still liked the way that Henry’s character progressed and grew throughout the book, and I kind of wish that Lisa Jewell had just stuck the landing. Make him the true antagonist. Instead, she kind of walks a lot of wild things that Henry does back and in the end, he’s just this nice, normal uncle (who happened to have murdered 3 or so people.)
Similarly, I felt very invested in Rachel’s story but in the end, it didn’t quite have that satisfying crunch to it. I thought the entire time that Rachel would end up dying at the hands of Michael (which would have also added more back story for Lucy and their relationship.) Ultimately, Rachel’s story doesn’t amount to much, which is unfortunate.
While the focus of the first book is on Libby, the baby who was abandoned in the mansion, we don’t see quite as much from her perspective. Mostly, the second book follows Rachel, Lucy, Henry, and DI Samuel Owosu. There are a few somewhat unsatisfying pieces that we are just expected to move on from (all the times that Libby lies to the police and seemingly faces no charges for) and where DI Samuel’s hunches seem to unravel the whole case.
Overall, I still really enjoyed this book and I simply read it with a grain of salt. I don’t really care about how realistic it is, I suppose. I’m here for the characters and Lisa Jewell did deliver on the promise of answering all the remaining questions from the first book. I simply wish that we had been given a juicer twist if the plot is going to verge on unbelievable anyway.
So, this book is certainly not as good as The Family Upstairs, but it is still a good book and well worth the read. And yes, there is no In & Out burger in Chicago, but like I said, we don’t need everything to be 100% true to life! Haha.
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