I love being given the opportunity to update our school library which is a unique space for both senior students and staff to access high quality literature. This is definitely a must-buy. It kept me absolutely gripped from cover to cover and is exactly the kind of read that just flies off the shelves. It has exactly the right combination of credible characters and a compelling plot thatI just could not put down. This is a great read that I couldn't stop thinking about and it made for a hugely satisfying read. I'm definitely going to order a copy and think it will immediately become a popular addition to our fiction shelves. 10/10 would absolutely recommend.

I read this back last year and unfortunately, it fell completely flat for me, it just didn't give me what was in the description, and was a little disappointed. There were so many characters and the plot just wasn't there for me, I really wanted to enjoy this as it was one of my first Netgalley acceptances, but I just didn't gel with it at all. But that is not to say that others won't enjoy it too, so of course, if you think it takes your fancy, do still go and give it a read!

I really liked the idea of this book, but I have started it twice in the last few months and just can’t get into it at all. I found the writing style to be quite confusing and despite being a way into the book I couldn’t tell you what was happening. Clearly many others have enjoyed it, so I think this is one that just isn’t for me. Wasn’t able to finish it.

Thank you to Netgalley for an advanced copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I found this book very hard to read, difficult subject matter to digest, which I found depressing. Nevertheless, an important subject to write and cleverly done in this murder mystery.

I just couldn't get into this book - though I don't think it's the author's fault - I think the subject matter just got between me and the story itself. The characters were solid, but I just couldn't get into it. I'm sorry, though I don't feel the book should be judged soley on that. I did however find some of it really hard to read.

The Frankie/Peggy storyline was brilliantly written and some really difficult issues were tackled sensitively. There were so many other characters I didn’t care about though and their stories jumped about all over the shop so I found things a bit confusing at times, wishing we could just return to Frankie and Peggy (and Vinnie, who I also loved).

Sttuggled to connect with this book and felt it a little hard to read in places, not sure i liked the ending as it felt as if something was missing although I'm not sure what...

Good read just not sure it was one for my collection, but thank you to the author for giving me the chance to read!

I was given a copy of The Weight of Small Things by Julie Lancaster by the publisher in exchange for an honest review. The story is about Frankie who's mother dies when she is 9. The story is told by Frankie and also by her mother starting from when Frankies father dies as she is born. Frankie wants to find out why her mother died, believing her mother's boyfriend killed her. The book started off slow but I enjoyed it although I found it ended very suddenly almost as if the end of the story was missing.

This is quite a heavy read in places and I just couldn't manage to connect with the characters. It tells the story through past and present and although that works, I just found it tough going for me. In places its quite dark which adds to the depth of the story but it just didn't flow for me.

Such a shame as I really wanted to enjoy this and can see that there are a lot of positive reviews so its just a personal view.

Thank you Netgalley.

I have to be honest and say that I have had trouble reading this book and I am not sure why.

I have made several attempts to do so, but I find I get confused or lose interest easily.

I don't want to leave a bad review, but I don't think I want to force myself to finish it the moment. I think I feel obligated to so as the publisher was so kind to give it to me in exchange for an honest review.

I will say this: there are some lovely prose in this story. I wrote some sentences down because I like them so much.

I do want to see where the story goes, but unfortunately, I am going to shelf this one for a bit.

Thank you for the opportunity to read this book in exchange for an honest review.

I couldn't get on with this book, it kept flitting backwards and forwards and kept losing me. Sadly i gave up.

Thank you NetGalley for the opportunity.

This book may seem very unassuming from the cover and the blurb. A book that seems entirely innocuous. Told mostly from the perspective of nine year old Frankie Appleton, who believes her mother has been murdered by an abusive partner, you could think this is a type of murder mystery. It's so much more than that.

The book is very dark and very triggering. It deals with a myriad of emotive topics including suicide, addiction, mental health, paedophilia, domestic abuse, miscarriage... it had so many horrible characters, so many tragic characters, I found myself pausing every so often just to digest the content.

This is a slow read (because of the content, it's pretty rough being honest) and also, I found the chopping and changing between characters to be entirely confusing! Don't let that put you off though, it's still a very good book..

I loved Frankie, she was the one redeeming character in the whole sorry mess of characters. She was clever, articulate and kind. She grew up in difficult circumstances and was the mother in the relationship between her and her mum. She was the type of person who came out good despite having a desperate childhood.

My heart broke (literally I fell to pieces a good few times reading this book, particularly about 90% of the way through it where I cried for 10 minutes into a roll of toilet tissue) for Peggy. She had a horrendous life. Growing up was an absolute sh*tshow for her and her adult life was just as desperate but she loved her daughter... and I'm still feeling a bit wobbly typing that now...

85% of the characters are despicable, ugly hearted people but were moulded by their equally ugly childhoods. Results of a system that utterly failed them. Results of a family that chose to pretend everything was fine to the neighbours. Now, the cycle continues.

I thought the ending was excellent and like most of the book, sad. There are a few twists and they were chilling.

This book isn't glamorous, or heartwarming or happy. It's an incredibly tragic book. It is one of the most upsetting books I have read in a while. I think fans of A Little Life will understand this book. Disclaimer: I hated A Little Life. However, I liked this book. Another disclaimer: Like or love is a weird word to use due to the heavy content.

This is a solid offering from Julie Lancaster.

I recieved this ARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I was surprised that I enjoyed this, as I was a little dubious to begin with. Really well written, good story.

Thank you NetGalley for my complimentary copy in return for my honest review.

3.5 stars, The Weight of Small Things by Julie Lancaster, was unique and dark and troubling.... I had some mixed feelings reading this book. First, I must reflect that I had some difficulty following the narrative. It jumps around between characters and time periods without a clear transition which required me to go back and review the last page or so and catch up again. I initially attributed this to perhaps a portrayal of an autistic child as Frankie is 9 years old and much was detailed in her stream of consciousness style writing about her favorite subject of gates. As Frankie tells more about her life the book becomes more than what happened to Frankie's mom, Peggy, who is found hanging in her bedroom when Frankie returns from Ellie's birthday party. As I read further, I noted that there are glimpses in each of these characters narratives that expose who and what shaped them and connected them as it all unfolds. Often, these connections and glimpses were awful and disturbing. I feel the ending of the book could have been so much more closure and perhaps I would not be so unsettled. In the end, I like this author and hope to give her another try. I found Frankie's story heartbreaking and also feel it is a unique perspective at abusive relationships, child abuse and neglect, mental illness and deceiptfulness that is so prevalent in our society today. I received an ARC of this story, all opinions are my own.

I'm afraid this book was very confusing and not what I expected. I thought this was going to be about obsessions or maybe something along the lines of autism or OCD. It jumped from character to character and it lost me half way through. I had no idea who was who. I read on to see if it got better but the ending was disappointing too

This book was very hard to put down. Ever page, every sentence drew me further into the life of Frankie and the people around her. The adults are all kinds of miserable, but Frankie goes on and does what she can to find her way and to find the truth. If I'd have to put it all into one word, I'd give it 'hope'. Hope through anything and everything, hope beyond faillure and mistakes.

This book is kind of marketed as a thriller/murder mystery but not quite the typical kind. Chapters are told from the point of view of different characters and from different periods in time and I have to admit this is where it lost me. I don't normally have difficulty following this format but I just couldn't get into this at all. I did finish the book but it was a chore to get through, I didn't warm to any of the characters and it just wasn't for me.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for giving me the opportunity to review this book.
This was not the book I was expecting. From the blurb, I thought it was going to be about a young girl with an obsession with gates, possibly bordering on OCD. That is not was this book is about. Frankie is 9, possibly the main character, who returns home one day to find her mother dead from apparent suicide.
The story then jumps between different narrators and timelines, I don’t know who some of the characters were or why they were there. I found myself read repeatedly flipping back to try to find out who someone was, and to check which timeline I was on.
The ending was poor, other reviewers have said that on reflection it tied up a lot of loose ends.
This wasn’t a book for me, I was very frustrated with it. Sorry for the poor review but I really didn’t enjoy it.

I really wanted to like this book. The blurb & the cover really appealed. However I found it very difficult to get into & I got confused with the characters so I'm afraid I had to give up.

Thanks to Netgalley & the publisher for giving me the chance to read & review this book. I'm sure many will love it, but it just wasn't for me.

“Everything should live up to expectation. A gate should always look like a gate. Today, silver sparks were ricocheting angrily off the tearstained wood. But even during the worst downpour it still fulfilled all the demands that were made of it, the dark timber glistening like tinsel, the rainwater trickling down the bevelled grooves like un-soothed tears running into the gutter.”

The Weight of Small Things is the first novel by British author, Julie Lancaster. At the age of nine, Frankie Appleton is effectively the carer for her mother, and her greatest pleasure is her intense interest in gates. When she arrives home to find her mother’s body in the bedroom, she is certain that she was murdered by her violent, psychopathic boyfriend, Stan, but everyone else, including the police, is convinced it was suicide. Frankie realises it’s up to her to prove otherwise.

Peggy was only nineteen when her fiancé, Ed Appleton, he of many grandiose plans, fell to his death in a disused quarry. Peggy went into labour with a baby she neither realised she was carrying, nor wanted. Peggy was convinced that the barmaid down at The Swan, Stella Evans was somehow responsible for Ed’s death. His mother, Brenda couldn’t keep Frankie, so Peggy Moon, depressed, grieving, haunted by her missing fiancé, was stuck raising a daughter she’d have gladly given away.

Orphaned, Frankie grudgingly consents to live with Brenda Appleton in her (too high) apartment, trying to document this new environment into a manageable form with her sketches of, and meticulous notes on its residents. She writes letters to Peggy: “Dear Mum, I’m sorry about the tone of my last letter, but I was extremely angry with you. I’m still angry with you for dying, but not to such an ‘extreme’ extent. Being angry all the time is just too exhausting.”

“She owned so few things and yet had somehow managed to remember barely any of them. Grief did that to you, she supposed –made you forget the small things, the ordinary things, the things that don’t really matter.” This quirky girl doesn’t fit in easily: “…being called ‘Elephant Man’s Daughter’ was nothing compared to that. They were just words. The letters weren’t made out of axes or spears, even though they sometimes felt like they were. They couldn’t hurt her any more than she’d already been hurt.”

But she gradually makes some friends: Harriet (Harry), Gavin at the camera shop, Vinnie Cheng; “They fell silent again. But it wasn’t an uncomfortable silence this time. It was more like a hyphen, a bridge to cross, the space between two breaths.” But she’s still determined to bring Stan to justice…

What a wonderful story Lancaster gives the reader! She easily evokes the era with songs and current affairs, and her depiction of the community setting will strike a chord with many. Her characters are complex and entirely believable, with strengths and very human weaknesses, as they deal with all that life throws at them: guilt, grief, adultery, domestic violence and more. Earnest and guileless, Frankie instantly elicits the reader’s concern for her welfare and ultimate survival.

Peggy is truly a tragic figure, with the effects of a terrible childhood (“instead of a fostering success, she remained a festering disappointment”) compounded by her loss and grief: “Were there degrees of grief? Peggy wondered, the grief you feel proportional to the length of time that you’ve known someone. Should her grief be less than that of a widow(er) who was married for forty years? Or was a person’s grief as big or as small as it needed to be? Hers certainly felt enormous. Often, it felt too big.”

As the story progresses it becomes evident that she is mentally ill, perhaps suffering from Munchausen by proxy, heavily dependent on pills and alcohol, and clearly unfit to raise a child she doesn’t seem to love. While most of the story is carried by Frankie and Peggy, this is interspersed with occasional narratives by people whose lives intersect with theirs.

Lancaster has a wonderful turn of phrase, as “Peggy tried not to overanalyse the comment, but it continued to sit in the creases of her forehead, refusing to make room for any more rational thoughts” and “She noticed the way that he sometimes looked at her mother, a look that stabbed at her flesh like an ice pick, changing the structure of her, shaping her into something else, something much smaller and darker” illustrate.

If at first the ending feels a tiny bit abrupt, careful consideration of what has already been revealed will reassure the reader that, even if Frankie doesn’t (or perhaps shouldn’t), they actually do know all they need to. This is very reminiscent of Joanna Cannon’s The Trouble with Goats and Sheep (and that’s a huge compliment). A brilliant debut!
This unbiased review is from an uncorrected proof copy provided by NetGalley and Mirror Books.