Dr. Zoe Goldman is a psychiatric resident, doing her time at a hospital while juggling her responsibility to her adoptive mother who is starting to lose her memory and is now in a nursing home. When treating a new patient, who has been in psychiatric wards for the past 20 years because she killed her own mother, Zoe starts to have nightmares about the fire that stole her mother’s life when Zoe was just four years old. Thus begins Zoes’s struggle with her repressed memories and her quest to learn more about her birth mother while her adoptive mother still has some sense of self left.
This new patient Sofia Vollano is up for release, but Zoe isn’t sure that this is the right thing to do. Through exploration of repressed memories, dreams, even hypnosis, Zoe is forced to confront her own troubled past as it bubbles to the forefront while she treats Sofia. But can Zoe make sense of what really happened when she was four years old and will her dementia riddled adoptive mother be any help, or will she have to dig deeper and do some old fashioned research?
This wasn’t a book that had me guessing and trying to connect the dots along the way, so the mystery wasn’t that big of an aspect of Little Black Lies to me. Zoe is a sympathetic character, but the side characters like her fellow doctors and her brother fell a little flat and one dimensional. Her love interests were a bit better explored, and you get to see more facets of both them and Zoe which I enjoyed.
I give Little Black Lies a 3.5 out of 5. The writing was excellent–especially everything that had to do with psychiatric medicine and hospitals–but it was hard to get into a flow with the story moving along through Zoe’s life bouncing back and forth as she slowly navigates between her life as a psychiatric resident and her personal quest to find her birth mother. While the audiobook quality was excellent like I’ve come to expect from Hachette Audio, I’m not sure if it hampered my enjoyment of this book since the pace and thrilling nature of the story didn’t really pick up until the final quarter of the novel.
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[…] Book Worms reviews Little Black Lies, by Sandra Block, narrated by Kara […]
I have a hard time with stories that don’t really get going until the final quarter especially when they’re supposed to be of the mystery or thriller or suspense nature but the psychiatric side sounds interesting!
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