{"id":3442,"date":"2024-02-15T16:34:54","date_gmt":"2024-02-15T16:34:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/?p=3442"},"modified":"2024-02-29T17:47:04","modified_gmt":"2024-02-29T17:47:04","slug":"things-dont-break-on-their-own","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/?p=3442","title":{"rendered":"Things Don\u2019t Break on Their Own"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong>If you like a jaw-dropping twist, this is the book for you<\/strong>, and I mean the reaction literally: at one point in this great domestic drama, one character whispers a closing remark to another that literally made my mouth hang open. And that wasn\u2019t the last surprise. The drama concerns a missing child, Laika Martenwood, whose English family\u2019s treatment by the media after she\u2019s gone will remind readers of the real-life McCann family, dragged through the tabloids after their daughter was snatched. The Martenwoods are more dysfunctional than even the tabloids say, though. The father is one of the most loathsome characters to come along in a while; his wife is so psychologically abused that she can\u2019t leave and can\u2019t protect her children from him; and daughters Willa and Laika are relentlessly mocked and bullied by the horrible man. As the book opens, we find Willa as an adult, barely hanging onto the life she\u2019s cobbled together while agonizing over whether her sister is still alive, where she could be, and what happened to her all those years ago. Moving back and forth in time, Collins puts the media and family ties under a magnifying glass, in the process reminding readers that just as things don\u2019t break on their own, they don\u2019t have to stay broken.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If you like a jaw-dropping twist, this is the book for you, and I mean the reaction literally: at one point in this great domestic drama, one character whispers a&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":3441,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_lmt_disableupdate":"","_lmt_disable":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[163,101,50,51,53],"class_list":["post-3442","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-review","tag-book-of-the-week","tag-family-life","tag-suspense","tag-thrillers","tag-women"],"featured_image_src":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/formidable\/4\/Things-400x400.png","featured_image_src_square":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/formidable\/4\/Things-400x600.png","author_info":{"display_name":"Henrietta Thornton","author_link":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/?author=4"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3442","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3442"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3442\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3441"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3442"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3442"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/firstcluereviews.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3442"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}