The World Outside My Window - Clare Swatman - ★★

AUTHOR: Clare Swatman

GENRE: Drama

RATING: 2 stars.

In a Nutshell: Has some merits but needs to be read without overanalysing. Some interesting characters. No surprises along the way. Alcoholic protagonist… sigh.

Story Synopsis:

1992. After she was attacked in a London street a year and a half ago, Laura has turned into an agoraphobe, spending her entire time inside the walls of her house. Her husband Jim and her best friend Debbie are her only two connections with the outside world.

But one day, Jim doesn’t return home from work. The police have neither time nor interest to pursue the missing person case, so Laura takes the search in her own hands, with Debbie for help. She believes that her neighbours would be the best persons to help her, as all of them knew Jim well. Once the secrets start tumbling out, Laura is forced to ask herself if she even knew her husband.

The story comes to us mostly in Laura’s perspectives, using first person for the 1985 timeline and third person for the present.

Bookish Yays:

🌷 Laura turns agoraphobic after an attack in a dark street at night. The impact of the trauma and the fear of going out is written well. Her steps towards overcoming her phobia when she is worried about Jim, while a bit unrealistic for how quickly she could overcome her extreme phobia, still make her vulnerability clear.

 

🌷 Laura’s neighbourhood of Willow Crest has some interesting characters. Carol – a busybody with a heart of gold and her long-suffering husband Arthur were my favourite of these. (I am sure Ben also would be a favourite with many, but I found him too perfect to be believable.) Laura’s friend Debbie is also a great character, and their friendship was sweet, though it was clear that Laura was the taker and Debbie, the giver in their lopsided relationship.

🌷 The use of first person for Laura’s past and third person for the present timeline was an interesting writing choice. While this could have gone either way, I liked how the change in voice indicated the timeline instantly.

 

🌷 A good point raised in the plot was how emotions can manipulate us into mistaking control for love, or gaslighting for guidance.

 

🌷 There are some thought-provoking lines.

Bookish Nays:

🌵 To my utter sadness, the blurb doesn’t indicate Laura’s alcohol addiction at all. I strongly dislike this trope, even though it didn’t lead to an unreliable narrator this time around. (The amount spent on alcohol consumption in this book would have fuelled the economy of a small town for a month!)

🌵 The “big secret” behind the disappearance is guessable the instant the first clue is revealed. So it was annoying to see how long everyone else took to guess the reason when the situation was so obvious. If you read this for some “mystery” feels, you will be disappointed.

 

🌵 There are so many silly things in the plot, I don’t know where to begin:

😒 If my husband went missing, trust me, the first place I will check for clues would not be with the neighbours but in his wardrobe and personal belongings. Who in their right mind would begin such searches asking neighbours for info? (Of course, in this novel, each neighbour conveniently has one useful clue to offer. So Laura’s method did work for her. Oh well!)

😒 Seven years of marriage, and yet Laura has never been curious about why her husband is so secretive about his job? No matter how sheltered your childhood, surely common sense works at least once in seven years. Am I being too optimistic about human intelligence?

😒 Jim is the neighbourhood charmer, the good and helpful guy whom everyone likes. Yet, when some neighbours see Laura with Ben, their reaction is, ‘Oh, too bad she is married to Jim. They would make such a nice couple.” Come again!? Who makes such remarks about potential alternate “couplings” when one of the persons is already married to a supposedly loving and loveable man?

🌵 While a part of me empathised with Laura, I still struggled to connect with her character due to the illogical decisions she takes time and again, and her gullibility in not questioning Jim’s behaviour even once. Part of it could be attributed to being an aftermath of the attack, but that just accounts for the past eighteen months. There was no reason for her to be so naïve prior to that, especially as she had been living independently since age eighteen. (Laura is thirty-three during the main events, not exactly a babe in the woods.)

 

🌵 There is a whole load of info-dumping at the end.

 

🌵 Except for the mention of the years and the lack of the obvious technological advancements such as the internet and smartphones, there was nothing in the plot that made me feel like it was set thirty years ago. The years were just a convenient way of circumambulating around the internet factor, which would have made it easier to locate the MiA husband.

🚩🚩Minor spoiler below:🚩🚩

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🌵 The reveal at the end attempts to make us empathise with Jim: a big mistake. I hated his first person ‘confession”, which felt like even we the readers were being gaslit into feeling sorry for him. If he didn’t get his comeuppance, I would have accepted it without complaint, as real life doesn’t always punish the guilty. But to justify the behaviour with a sob story – No!

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~~END OF SPOILER~~

This story could have been tremendous with such a strong premise, but the implementation was just disappointing.

I had first read this author’s “How to Save a Life” (now republished as “The Night We First Met”) last June and was blown away by how well she sketched characters. But the two books I have tried since have been just about okay. I might still read her works in future, but I will definitely not go out of my way to get to them.

Not a must-read as far as I am concerned. But mine is an outlier review, so do check out the other reviews before you take a call. If you can read with your heart and ignore the sirens in your head, do give this a try.

My thanks to Boldwood Books and NetGalley for the DRC of “The World Outside My Window”. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the book. Sorry this didn’t work out better.