Review: The Other Family - Wendy Corsi Staub

Review: The Other Family - Wendy Corsi Staub - January 2022

Kia ora, bookworms! Pour yourself a strong cuppa,  maybe a proper flat white if you're feeling fancy  because oh my goodness, do I have a read for you today. I finished Wendy Corsi Staub's The Other Family in one sitting, curled up on the couch with my cat on my lap and the wind rattling the windows outside, and honestly? That might be the most perfectly atmospheric reading experience I've had all year.

Right, let me set the scene for you. Nora and her family are packing up their lives and heading to New York,  new city, fresh start, all that exciting energy of beginning again somewhere unfamiliar. They find a house. They move in. And then, as you do when you're settling into a new place and getting a bit nosy with the neighbours, they discover that their lovely new home was the site of a horrific family slaughter years ago. Naturally, they're gutted. Why weren't they told? Who keeps something like that from a buyer?

But here's where Wendy Corsi Staub absolutely hooked me and I mean properly, like a good fish-and-chip shop on a Friday night  because it turns out Nora isn't actually shocked. She's not shocked at all. Because she already knew. She knew everything.

 You see, growing up, Nora had a best friend named Anna. The kind of childhood friendship that feels like it'll last forever, the two of them inseparable, thick as thieves, the sort of mates who finish each other's sentences. Ellie and Anna. Anna and Ellie. And then one day, just like that, it was gone. Nora got shipped off to live with her biological dad and his wife, Teddy, and that whole chapter of her life? Sealed. Buried. Never spoken of again.

And her husband doesn't know any of it. Not about Anna. Not about that night. Not even that Teddy exists.

Now listen . I grew up in a small town where everyone knew everyone's business whether you liked it or not, so the idea of keeping a secret that size from the person you share a bed with felt both completely wild and somehow completely believable to me. We all have those parts of ourselves we tuck away, don't we? The bits we think are too complicated or too painful to drag back into the light. Nora's just taken it a fair few steps further than most of us.

But then comes the element that truly made my jaw drop. Someone from Nora's past spots her daughter, Stacey and does a double-take. Because Stacey is the absolute spitting image of Anna. I mean, imagine: you've spent years building this careful, curated life, and then your kid's face becomes the thing that threatens to pull the whole structure down around your ears. 

From that point on, the pressure ratchets up beautifully. Someone from the past is circling, threatening to reveal what really happened that night. And you're sitting there reading, wondering: how far will a person go to keep their secrets? What are you willing to sacrifice to protect the life you've built? And  this is the question that kept me up past midnight, I'll be honest  was Nora ever really the person her husband thought he married?

One thing I'll always appreciate in a thriller is an author who trusts their reader, and Wendy Corsi Staub does exactly that. She doesn't rush to explain every dark corner , she lets you sit in the discomfort, lets you lean in and strain to see what's lurking there. The pacing is really well done, with the backstory of Ellie-and-Anna woven through the present-day tension in a way that feels natural rather than clunky. And the domestic setting , the new house, the family dinners, the kids adjusting to a new school  gives everything a warmth that makes the darkness hit even harder by contrast.

I'll be upfront no book gets away without me having at least a small nitpick, and mine here is that a couple of the supporting characters felt a little thin for my liking. I wanted to know more about Teddy in particular; there are hints of something rich and complicated there that I felt the story only half-delivered on. But honestly? These are minor wobbles in an otherwise gripping read, and neither stopped me turning pages at speed. 

The Other Family is a proper page-turner of the best kind. the kind that makes you miss your bus stop because you're too absorbed to notice the world going on around you. It's got secrets, it's got buried history, it's got a mother doing increasingly questionable things to protect her family, and it's got that delicious creeping dread that good domestic thrillers do so well. Wendy Corsi Staub clearly knows exactly what she's doing, and I'll absolutely be seeking out more of her work.

If you're after something to sink your teeth into on a long weekend, or you need a book that'll genuinely keep you guessing, add this one to the pile. You won't regret it  though you might regret starting it at 10pm on a school night, just saying.


Amazon: https://amzn.to/4b4PFhf