Richard's Review:
There’s a touch of Dickens’s Great Expectations at the start of this story: mysterious, impossibly wealthy benefactor; smooth-talking lawyer; baffled but grateful recipient.
But there the similarities end. Ruth Kelly has written a spine-tingler of a tale, full of haunting twists and turns. It has the feel of something of a classic as you turn the pages, although it starts off in a very modern, contemporary way. Adele, a struggling on-line influencer in a struggling marriage, gets tipsy late one night and has ‘a lightbulb moment’. She appeals to her few thousand followers to crowd-fund her ‘dream’ of buying a romantic French chateau.
The response by next morning is overwhelming. In the worst possible way. Adele is roundly reviled by hundreds of trolls. ‘Entitled whore!’ ‘Scrounger!’ ‘Bitch, you’re almost 30 - try growing up!’ Her ‘lightbulb’ has been comprehensively blown.