Excellent book. I adored the storyline and the characters. A real page turner. I would this recommend this book.

A creepy good time! Fans of Nick Cutter will appreciate Jo Furniss’ new novel, All the Little Children. This novel played to my love of all things horror! Picture this...two women, one teenage girl, and three little kids take a camping trip. Although there is a cellphone tower nearby, they lose all connectivity. They later come across a farm filled with screaming cows who have not been milked. A dog appears, blood on its coat. They eventually head back to town and discover an atrocity. This novel takes the reader on a wild ride filled with creepiness and fringed with governmental plots. I would love to see a sequel!

Wow what a story! What would you do to protect your children? This is every Mom's worst nightmare come true! Very exciting, thrilling book! Thank you so very much to NetGalley and Lake Union Publishing for an ARC in return for an honest review.

Didn't realize this was an end of the world type book. Definitely not for me although I am sure others will enjoy it.

My thanks to Lake Union Press and Netgalley for allowing me to read/review this book. I'm a bit frustrated because Ms. Furniss has obvious writing skills, but her characters were so unlikable, and did the most idiotic things, that I just couldn't get past it. About 40% on, I started speed reading to get to the finish. That's when my proverbial crap hit the fan! There is no ending to this book. What happens next? Well, what about...? Nothing. I can't recommend this story, and I'm not even sure if I can forgive the author enough to read another book of hers. Great writing, but lousy story.

A family stuck in a forest, in danger from an unknown source. Brrrr - but this novel becomes obvious it’s a dystopian novel and my interest started to wane. Not because the book wasn’t interesting, but rather because it wasn’t clear from the beginning that this was dystopian and so I thought it was going to be based in a more realistic setting.
That said, the setting was quite wonderful with the woods not being the ideal place for a camping holiday in this world or otherwise! Like Mama Bear protecting her cubs, gut instinct kicks in for Marlene to protect her family and then there’s the uncertainty of what to do with the kids who turn up, lost and what needed to be done in order to survive.
Mobile phones of course, tell the family that things aren’t going well, and that it’s not just the forest location that’s too blame. Then things really do escalate quickly and the forest becomes feral, violent, a place of danger and trauma but also the only place seemingly left where survival has any chance at all.

The ending was disappointing but I think that’s more to do with the fact that this is a first novel in a series or at least this seems to be hinted at. There’s mention of novels and settings such as Narnia and Lord of the Flies in the story but I think the dystopian world could have been clearer from the outset.

I really enjoyed this book. I found myself thinking about it when I wasn't reading it. Marlene comes across as a tough woman, but in those circumstances you would have to toughen up to survive. She protected her children fiercely.
This is Jo Furniss first novel and I look forward to her next book.

Thank you Netgalley for the chance to read it and to Jo Furniss for one of my favourite reads this year.

Marlene is hoping for some quality time when she takes them on a camping trip, but she ends up in the middle of a waking nightmare. The first sign that things aren’t right starts when Marlene sees a lot of smoke rising in the distance and cannot get a signal on her phone. Something awful has happened, but she’s not sure what. It would appear that the former world has passed away and Marlene and her family a must make their way through a world where everything has changed and they will have to fight to survive. This books lunges into full on action from the very beginning. Great for dystopian fiction lovers, but a little more time left for character development would have been nice. From the ending, it would appear that this book will have at least one sequel, which I look forward to reading

Oh my, oh my, oh my. You know when you’re in a bit of a reading slump and desperate for something to just hit that spot, the one which has you back in the zone and raring to go. Well I was fortunate enough to find not just one such book but two on the bounce. This was book two.

From very early on I was drawn into the book but perhaps not for the reasons you’d think. Jo Furniss had managed to absolutely capture that sense of the corporate mom, taking the kids on a camping holiday and the frustrations that being torn from mobile communication and thrust into the petty squabbles of young children who have no electronic gadgets to amuse them bring.

Now being a native Shropshire lass, there is nothing remotely odd sounding to me that a call which seems to go through on a mobile one minute gets completely cut off the next. I have that problem in my own office, depending on which side of my desk I’m standing. And the whole image of the family cramped into one tents because they couldn’t find the instructions on the other completely rang true of every holiday I went on as a child. Not the one tent thing – we only ever took one – but the not being able to assemble it part. Every single time.

And yet … this is more than just a lost signal due to the remote nature of the Shropshire Hills. Just for clarity, these are hills for which being at the top is less likely to give you a signal than being half way down, and there are so many of them that a lost mobile signal is highly plausible. But you just know that there is more to the story than that. From that very first chapter, that very simple interaction between our protagonist Marlene and the outside world, Jo Furniss begins to build a kind of tension and feeling of unease which is leading us to a most terrible discovery. When one of the children climbs to the top of a tree and claims to see fires, combined with the unease of the cows, you know something is terribly, terribly wrong.

Now I’m not going to say too much about the plot as, for me, part of the beauty of the story was in the discovery of just what had happened and how Marlene and her family came to be quite so isolated. Needless to say the act is quite apocalyptic and the resultant actions of those who should provide aid quite shocking. Something awful has happened, something which the little camp remained isolated from, and yet it will change their lives forever.

Jo Furniss has taken a very simple premise and pulled it into a cracker of a story. It is a strange feeling in a way as Marlene is not necessarily someone who it is easy to like and yet the more the story progressed, the more I came to understand and perhaps not like but at least respect her and the choices she makes. She is a fierce woman, and ultimately a protector. She can be selfish at times but ultimately does love her family and you know would do anything for them. When faced with having to take care of others, she is initially combative in attitude, perhaps due to the need to protect her young, but ultimately her nurturing instincts kick in.

Her sister-in-law Joni is an entirely different case. She is warm and nurturing, a natural mother where Marlene fails. And yet she cannot control her own daughter, something which costs the group in the harshest, and most heart wrenching way possible and forces Joni into a previously unthinkable act, even if it was for selfless reasons. There are only two scenes, those involving Peter and a stray dog, Horatio, that truly got me. I could handle all else but these two do tug at the heart strings. Anything with children and dogs truly do.

As the story moves on, and you come to understand what is happening, you know that the things which the group can see are almost as fearsome and definitely as deadly as those which they can’t. Political decisions being made which can both save and condemn those who are thus far untouched by the tragedy. There are moments in which the fear and tension almost leap from the page, moments which can totally creep you out (flies – yuk), and others in which you can smile at children just being children. Who hasn’t seen it happen where a young child feeds every scrap of food to the dog? Yep. You’ve been there too right?

If you like a read with an apocalyptic undertone, then this could well be the book for you. This is a book about a famly fighting for survival against all odds. About the extraordinary steps people will take when faced with near impossible choices. How instinct takes over from logic and rational thinking and moral lines have to become blurred for the good of many over a few. Yes, there are moments in the book which may seem implausible but the there are lot of things throughout history which seemed unlikely once. And given the current political climate, some decisions which are made, some actions which are taken… Well they don’t seem to feel quite so far fetched anymore. And the ending? Well let’s just say that this has the potential to be continued. I certainly hope it is as I’d loved to know what happens next.

For some reason I didn’t pick up on the fact that this was a dystopian novel based on the blurb so when I started reading it, I was a bit surprised. I don’t mean that in a bad way, I’m not opposed to a post apocalyptic book, I just didn’t catch the hints in the description (duh Amy) and I had to adjust my mindset and expectations right away. But once I did I found this book to be a pacey, compelling read though I did have a few issues by the end.

The entire thing is told from Marlene’s point of view and she was a really difficult character to like. She’s brusque and comes across as cold and unfeeling even when she’s in the role of mama bear protecting her cubs. Despite the fact that I didn’t really relate to her on a personal level I was invested in her story and I could relate to her doing her best to protect her children. Her sister in law Joni wasn’t my favorite either, but again these women were fighting for their lives so I tried not to judge them too harshly. But I was shaking my head in frustration quite a bit and wondering what they hell they were thinking?!

This would be the perfect book club read as it poses many tough questions that could provide hours of discussion. How far would you go to protect your children? Would you try and keep other children safe at the possible risk of your own family? Are adults duty bound to step up and care for kids in serious times of need? There’s SO much to talk about here!

This was a page turner that held my attention, there’s something fascinating about seeing ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances. Furniss is a talented writer who conveyed a strong sense of urgency throughout, I was constantly worried about what would happen next. All was really going great until the ending and honestly, it really disappointed me. I don’t want to say too much but it was a huge cliffhanger and at first I assumed there would be a sequel, then I poked around and it sounds like there isn’t one planned?! It’s a pretty huge letdown and endings are super important to me and without the promise of another book to follow up I’m seriously displeased. Sigh. A cliffhanger is understandable, albeit frustrating, if you know that eventually you’ll get some answers, but never having any resolution always seems like a cop out to me. As annoyed as I am today it wouldn’t stop me from reading another book by Furniss, she really is a good writer so I would definitely give her a second chance!