A sharply hilarious and ultimately heartfelt novel about a former teen superstar who grudgingly agrees to a reboot of the show that made her (in)famous, from the author of Reasonable Adults.

Twenty years after Ocean Views went off the air, the beloved TV show about teenage romance and angst is back. No one is more surprised than its former star, Agnes “Ness” Larkin, that she’s agreed to step back into the role of Hailey Grant. After her father/manager took off with her earnings, Ness ran away from the spotlight in shame. But maybe it’s time to stare her past, and her castmates, in their discreetly Botoxed faces.

That enthusiasm lasts until the first table read, which, in co-star Coco’s words, is “like a high school reunion without the dim lighting or booze.” Ness assumed her old fling Hayes Beaumont would be too busy doing Big Hollywood Things to take part, but there he is, seated beside her, exuding pheromones and success.

En route to the deluxe Bahamas resort where they’re to start filming, the cast gets stranded by a storm. Stuck on a tiny island with a paltry cache of food and quite possibly the most useless survival group in history, Ness tries to reconcile her youthful dreams with where she’s ended up—figuratively and literally. The producers wanted drama on and off-screen, and they’re going to get it, but where will Ness be when it’s all over?

Dear Ms. Lefler,

Well, this certainly is not how I pictured this book would go. I thought I was getting a rom-com second chance romance. I didn’t. I must also question it being described as “sharply hilarious.” There is some “heartfelt” I will give it that but when all is said and read, even that is in short supply. What I wrote on my reading list is “Bonkers TV show revival with self centered Millennials on a survivor island.”

Agnes “Ness” Larkin is hoping for a second chance at … everything. The blurb lays it all out. She’s a former YA/NA star who lost it all first when her father absconded with all her hard earned money and second when she reacted badly to that, pushed her friends away, and ended up slinking back home to Toronto where she’s spent years as a property manager. I will give her props for actually doing that up to and including unstopping toilets, laying floor tile, and dealing with demanding tenants. She took this job looking for a paycheck to maybe finance buying another property but mainly to make amends for her past behavior.

First let me say there were way too many characters dumped on me at the beginning of the book. With seven cast members and a crew person to keep track of, I was desperately scrambling to keep a mental list of “who’s who” in my head. Eventually I could keep everyone straight in my head but that took a long time.

The setting for this version of “Survivor” was interesting. The castaways find themselves on a now deserted island in the Bahamas which used to be owned by a porn film king. The decor is tacky trashy and as it’s been abandoned for years, it crumbles around them. Without much food, a generator with only 5 containers of gas, no cell service, and questionable water they’re stuck. They do manage to pull off a bit of trying to make the island visible to possible searchers but fail to do something that I would have thought would be “up there” on a list of things to search for. It’s not the first silly or stupid thing they’ll do.

Ness is getting her chance at trying to make things right with those she spurned in the past alright. For some reason, be it spite or the fact that she’s been a hands-on property manager for years, all tasks – icky or otherwise – seem to fall on Ness. She might grumble and huff a bit but darned if Ness doesn’t actually have some know-how and leadership skills. It’s needed because Lawd these are some whiney ass cry babies she has to deal with. Honestly there were times when I wanted to lean into the book and advise Ness to head off on her own and leave these entitled losers behind. At almost every stage they blamed Ness for almost everything.

About 2/3 of the way through the book I finally just decided to go with the flow and see how this mystery (and the book is mainly the mystery behind how they ended up on this island) resolved. I guessed what was actually happening

Being stranded and in close proximity with all these people gives Ness a chance to make some amends and face her own past. She does learn, she does take advantage of the opportunity, she does come out stronger. Yay Ness. If I were her, I would think long and hard about the fact that so many of them were willing to believe the worst of her but then we’re talking about actors who are seemingly willing to do just about anything to climb the ladder in Hollywood. The ending is completely bonkers. I’ll give the book credit for getting enough of my interest to keep on keeping on when I was bewildered by who’s who and for getting me to stick around to the end just to see how the others would apologize to Ness but this is not a book I would be interested in rereading. C

~Jayne

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They met when they were teenagers. Now they’re adults, and time has been kind to some and unkind to others—none more so than to Bea, the one they lost nine long years ago. They’ve gathered to reminisce at Bea’s family’s estate, a once-glorious mansion straight out of a gothic novel. Best friends, old flames, secret enemies, and new lovers are all under one roof—but when the weather turns and they’re snowed in at the edge of eternity, there’s nowhere left to hide from their shared history.

As the walls close in, the pretense of normality gives way to long-buried grief, bitterness, and rage. Underneath it all, there’s the nagging feeling that Bea’s shocking death wasn’t what it was claimed to be. And before the weekend is through, the truth will be unleashed—no matter the cost.

I am a fan of closed circle mysteries, though I wasn’t sure if this one would qualify, since it at first seemed to be about friends reuniting nine years after the death of a beloved friend, rather than one where a character is killed and there are limited number of suspects. Things developed in the latter direction, but it took a while.

The narrator, Luna, is 29, and we find out almost on the first page that she is going blind. This is a huge fear of mine, so I was inclined to be sympathetic even if at times I got annoyed by the constant reminders that soon she would not be able to see. Ironically, I guess, Luna is a photographer, and she’s determined to get as much on film as she can while she can.

The story is set in New Zealand, with a diverse cast (something Singh excels at). Luna is ethnically Chinese, though she is adopted, presumably by a white family (it’s not made clear except that she notes the difference in coloring between her and her mother). The group includes a native Maori, a child of refugees from Sudan, and a character of Indian descent, among others. I really do like Singh’s commitment to portraying a melting pot with her characters.

At the start of the story, Luna is headed north, to a part of New Zealand that she refers to as “alpine” (Washington state was my point of reference, but I have no idea how accurate that was). She’s getting together with old friends she met as a teenager. There actually *are* eight in the group, since one member brings a new girlfriend. Our cast of characters:

Luna; narrator, photographer, secretly going blind;

Darcie and Ash; the hosts – it’s Darcie’s dilapidated but still impressive family estate that is the site of the reunion;

Vansi and Phoenix, Luna’s best friend and her husband – Vansi is a nurse and Phoenix is a doctor on the verge of becoming a surgeon;

Aaron and Grace; he is part of the group and she is his new fiancée – Aaron is sweet-natured and religious (though the latter is conveyed with a light touch) and Grace is very bubbly;

Kaea; handsome, charming and promiscuous; he’s a lawyer.

The missing person the – “should have been” – is Darcie’s younger sister Bea. Nine years before she had disappeared from the group, then died at a distant location, ostensibly by suicide. Luna is even now not reconciled to the loss of Bea. I mentioned that I was inclined to be sympathetic to Luna because of her impending blindness, but by a quarter of the way through she was working on my nerves hard.

Luna’s devotion to Bea felt unwholesome and honestly creepy. Luna states on several occasions that she would do anything for Bea. She mentions that her attachment is not sexual, twice I think, but it feels like it kind of is? Which – that part is not creepy, but the dynamics of the relationship, the intensity of Luna’s devotion and her insistence that Bea was the most beautiful, wondrous creature to ever walk the Earth – all of that was really strange and off-putting. It made me view Luna as an unreliable narrator, which I don’t think was the intent, since her view of Bea is never really challenged by the other characters. It’s just…very, very weird.

The group passes an uneventful first night, but things start to fall apart the next day. A freak storm hits while most of the group are out hiking, and they return soaked, with Kaea injured. Kaea is the strongest and most competent hiker of the friends, and later he shares with Luna that one of his shoes was apparently deliberately damaged right before the hike, leading to his fall and injury.

It’s at this point that I kind of wondered what would happen if Kaea and Luna just confronted the group with the evidence of sabotage. But that never happens in this type of book, so they keep it to themselves. There’s also some business with a doll of Bea’s that keeps turning up unexpectedly and traumatizing Darcie. It begins to be clear that either one (or more) of the group is acting with bad intent or….there’s someone else in the house. Did I mention that the house has a number of secret passages?

Then the rain turns to snow and soon the group are genuinely snowed in. Tensions rachet up as a character disappears and is later found in a secret room with an unexplained head injury.

There is some business with Darcie’s ancestors, the original tenants of the mansion. The mother of the family (whose secret diary Luna finds) was essentially a mail-order bride brought over from England, and her husband was at best dour and at worst erratic. Their oldest daughter seemed to hate her younger siblings, and eventually the mother and those younger siblings died in a house fire that caused great damage to the house (the damaged parts were never torn down, for reasons unclear).  The suggestion seems to be that perhaps the eldest daughter, Elizabeth, killed her mother and siblings.

It’s further suggested that there is a strain of madness that affects the family’s descendants to this day. Darcie confides in Luna that Bea was severely mentally ill, and in fact was medicated heavily from the age of 13. Luna finds this hard to believe, both because she never saw signs of mental illness in Bea and because Luna literally worships the ground Bea walked on and doesn’t like to hear anything that could be construed as bad about her. She instead suspects Darcie; for a longtime close friend, Luna doesn’t actually seem to like Darcie that much. Luna resents that Darcie has Ash, who loved Bea first (Luna is convinced he still does).

I have complaints about some of Singh’s writing tics in her Psy/Changeling books, but there were different prose issues with There Should Have Been Eight. For some reason Luna constantly refers to Vansi as her “best friend” – by my count 22 times in the book. It was in situations where it made more sense just to use her name; e.g. “my best friend walked into the room”, “my best friend hates kumquats.” It doesn’t seem like a big deal, but it really annoyed me, and it increased my annoyance with Luna.

Luna was really my big problem with the book. A few issues aside, the writing was good and the plot was strong. The denouement was twisty as expected (though I half-guessed the identity of a villain). As a mystery There Should Have Been Eight was a reasonably satisfying book. There are aspects of the plot that don’t bear close scrutiny, but I can live with that.

But: Luna. She is a cipher. We know a collection of facts about her – she’s adopted, she’s a photographer, she has a rare disease that will shortly take her eyesight – but the only sense in which she comes alive is in her bizarre obsession with Bea. My problem was really two-fold: 1) I didn’t like Luna, found her creepy, and didn’t trust her version of reality and 2) we only get Luna’s point of view and nothing in the story really challenges that POV, which left me feeling off-kilter.

If the book had dialed down the depiction of Bea as a magical fairy of goodness and light *or* if it acknowledged that Luna was cuckoo for cocoa puffs where Bea was concerned, I’d be able to judge it more fairly. As it is, that aspect of the story cast a pall over everything else for me. Because it was still readable and the twists were decent, I’ll give this a C.

Best,

Jennie

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