The Last House on the Street was a really good read, told in alternating viewpoints - Kayla, in 2010 and Ellie, in 1965. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and loved the characters. I also really enjoyed reading about the SCOPE project, I had never heard of it before.

As always an interesting topic with an excellent narrative. Diane Chamberlain never disappoints me.

The Last House on the Street is set in Round Hill, NC. It has two timelines. The first one is in 1965 and the second one in 2010.

In 1965, Ellie Hockley is a college student at UNC when she gets involved in the Civil Rights movement. Ellie decides to join the SCOPE project to make a difference. The program entails having white people motivate black people to vote.

By joining SCOPE, Ellie alienates her family, her friends, and worse she becomes someone the Klan is interested in. Ellie doesn't care about any of that after she starts visiting the homes of black people and learning about the importance of them voting to get the help they need like new roads, electricity, etc.

In 2010, Ellie is returns to North Carolina for the first time in over four decades. Ellie is back to take care of her dying brother and her elderly mother too.

In this same timeline, we also meet Kayla. Kayla Carter is an architect. She is also a recent widow. Her husband was an architect too and he died in an accident in her new home located in Shadow Ridge Estates.

Kayla has mixed feelings about the new home. On the one hand, the house was the dream that she and her husband created. On the second hand, she doesn't feel safe living there when weird things begin to happen.

There are so many questions...

What happened to Ellie in 1965? What is the connection between Ellie and Kayla? And why is someone threatening Kayla and her daughter?

The Last House on the Street was quite an interesting, compelling and engaging novel. I was fearful for Ellie and Wyn from the very beginning. I was also trying to guess what happened and fearing the worst. For me, hands down, the 1965 timeline was much more addicting than the contemporary one.

Why not a 5? I just didn't quite believe the big revelation at the end.

Cliffhanger: No

4/5 Fangs

Really enjoyed this book. I loved how the author has readers going back and fourth between the past and present time lines. Characters and story flowed nicely and I kept wanting to read more! This book kept me guessing and I loved the little feel of suspense it held for me. I would definitely recommend this book to others!

Diane Chamberlain never, ever disappoints! I devoured this book so quickly! I was so intrigued with the story line, and kept trying to figure out some of the character connections along the way. It's a heartbreaking tale of true love , racism and equal rights. You won't want to put this one down!

All I will say with this one is try to go into it blind and just enjoy the reading. Diane Chamberlain can surely write a book that you don't want to end. She is one of my favorite authors.

Diane Chamberlain is one of those authors that will never disappoint you. When you pick up one of her books, you KNOW you're going to enjoy it. So I was not surprised in the slightest when I got through "The Last House on the Street" in one. single. day.

Ellie's story was a beautiful telling of who you can love and who you can trust. Chamberlain wrote so beautifully and heartbreakingly about the struggle between whites and blacks in the South, mid-1960s. It was accurate...and it was terrifying. What struck me most was how well Chamberlain subtly hinted at the fact that these same problems exist today, and we need to stop ignoring them. While this time period was a slow build to the main action, it was so worth it in the end.

In our other timeline, set in 2010, we find Kayla - a newly widowed architect struggling with the loss of her husband and the sometimes scary woods surrounding the home she and said husband had designed and built together. She and her little girl deal with being harassed and haunted...but why?

Eventually the two timelines come together for one explosive finale and I Am Here For It! Wow!

This book was a solid 4.5 stars for me. I highly recommend it to my fellow Chamberlain Fans and anyone who enjoys historical fiction and/or a dual timeline - which are my favorite go-tos.

A HUGE Thank You to NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for an advanced copy of the book for me to read and review.

LOVED! I'm not sure how to word this, but the storytelling of The Last House on the Street is SO good. The writing flowed and the pacing was perfect, but just the way Diane Chamberlain chose to tell this story was amazing. The duel timelines and POV's, the sequence of events, and choosing when to change timelines was masterful. When I started this book I thought this was my first by Diane Chamberlain, but it turns out another book I 5 starred a few years ago was also by her- The Dream Daughter. Now I'm off to read her backlist!

Diane Chamberlain weaves another timely story in dual timelines, 1965 and 2010. North Carolina 1965,,civil rights, voting rights, KKK, a family and community divided. 2010 a new house is built at the end of the street where bad things happened in 1965 and the mysteries surrounding this are eventually revealed.

While I love Diane Chamberlain, this book just didn't hit the mark with me. I read about half, and found myself reading a chapter and putting it down until the next day. I normally read a book in a day, or more than one book.
The writing, as always was flawless, the story, going back and forth just wasn't working for me.
Thanks to the author, publisher and netgalley for the ARC.

I absolutely loved this novel. I read through it om just a couple of days because I couldn't out it down. I love stories that interweve the present and past, it always makes for a better book in my opinion. I loved the elements of mystery and a little bit of suspense that kept me wanting to know what happened next. The parts set in the past during the Civil Rights Movement were especially good, but I loved the present day story as well

I am a big Diane Chamberlain fan and was so excited for this book. Typical to her style, she takes on social injustice issues of the past and weaves them together with a modern storyline. This one was good, but not as great as some of her other books. If I was reading it by any other author, I may not judge it as harshly. It is a good story, but I found this one predictable and it lacked the connection with the characters that I have felt in her other works. Still a solid read.

I’ve really enjoyed the other Diane Chamberlain books I’ve read but this one didn’t work for me. DNF at 50%. Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for the advance reading copy.

I normally don't go for a dual timeline novel because it's <i>wayyyyyy overdone at this point</i>. However, somehow this sort of worked and I didn't mind it. Overall, I tend to have some mixed feelings about this novel. Like, I appreciate what this book was trying to do and what it was trying to say, but <i>have we not learned enough about the white savior narrative</i>? It's why I make a conscious choice not to teach books like [book:The Help|4667024] or [book:To Kill a Mockingbird|2657]. It ended up rubbing me the wrong way.

Had this novel just focused on the women's rights issues and the SCOPE, I probably would have rated it higher. Once it got into the klan stuff and her relationship with Wyn they started to lose me. Part of me is really upset we didn't get more African American perspective in this novel. Granted, I know Diane Chamberlain is a white woman so therefore she writes to the narrative she is comfortable with, but we hear about a lot of oppression in this book without hearing from the voices of the oppressed.

Anyways, I did <i>somewhat</i> enjoy this enough to give 3 stars. I just think, as someone who's job it is to teach and read historical accounts of various groups of people all day, that this was just a pretty packaged, mass-market, anti-racism book with a fluffy cover.

<i>I received a copy of this novel from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review</i>

Thank you to Netgalley, the publishing house and the authro for the opportunity to read a complimentary copy of this book in return fro a review based upon my honest opinion.

This was a haunting book from a different time. It is a dual timeline story, told in the present (2010) from the point of view of Kayla, a woman whose husband dies while constructing their new home and as it comes time to move into it, she discovers all is not as it may seem. The past story is from 1965, from the view point of Eleanor (Ellie) a young adult who realizes there is more to life than doing what you are told and not questioning your surroundings, a time to stand up for what is right Ellie find a passion for civil rights when she hears about the SCOPE program, a program to help get black voters registered to vote. I had not heard of this program before and found it very interesting

A woman shows up at Kayla's office and ultimately she feels threatened by the visitor but she cannot discover who the woman was. When Kayla moves in she introduces herself to Ellie and discovers her father has a connection to Ellie's past. As we read of Ellie's past, we learn that she discovers too late how bigoted hr smalll town is and her loss is enough to make her eave her home for 45 years.

A wonderfully told story, well written with memorable characters.

Author Diane Chamberlain’s books never fail to captivate. The Last House on the Street is a suspenseful, heartfelt and emotional story about civil rights in a dual timeline between the 60’s and 2010. From the moment I began, I was captivated by the writing, the characters, the intense drama of this story. The Last House on the Street is a lion of a book that will roar into your heart. Be prepared to be entangled in its lure.

I voluntarily reviewed a complimentary copy of this book which I received from NetGalley. All views expressed are only my honest opinion.

The Last House On The Street by Diane Chamberlain was certainly quite a story. Dual timelines, 1965 where Ellie’s wanting to do something about social injustice amidst racial brutality, and 2010, where we meet Kayla, widow mom that just got a house finished built and it sits in the land where Ellie grew up. So the two stories come together at the end nicely. DC has penned one of my favorite novels The Dream Daughter and I always keep looking forward to see what she brings next! This one was well done but not to that level. 3.5 Rounding it up to 4 stars.

1st Line: "I'm in the middle of a call with a contractor when Natalie, our new administrative assistant, pokes her head into my office."

Review: Told in dual timelines, Diane Chamberlain's latest begins in 2010 with architect Kayla Carter, a woman still reeling from - and dealing with - the death of her husband, killed in an accident while building the dream home the two of them had planned and worked on together for years. Now that same home - the first finished residence in Shadow Ridge Estates, a new upscale development blossoming in Round Hill, North Carolina - is ready for move-in for both Kayla and her four-year-old daughter ... but Kayla can't decide if her dream house has now become a nightmare, especially when a strange, vaguely threatening woman drops by her office one day, seemingly knowing a bit too much about both Kayla and her tragedy.

Round Hill in 1965, still very much segregated and racist, is the bane of Ellie Hockley's existence when - taking after her deceased favorite aunt - the young activist decides to spend one summer off college by working with a program to help register local Black residents to vote. A young, white girl from a (by comparison) privileged family in town, Ellie's parents, brother - even the boy she may or may not be in love with - are vehemently opposed to the young womans putting herself in potential danger, even as their own prejudices and bigotry rise to the surface. But Ellie remains strong in her convictions of racial equality ... even in klan country, where aything could happen to a young, pretty white girl seemingly turning traitor against her own kind ...

The Last House on the Street is the story of both of these strong women, and how (or even if) their stories might converge in surprising - even shocking - ways. This was my first time reading Diane Chamberlain, after years of hearing so many great things about her work, and while I think I had a stronger connection to Ellie and her story, the book's trips back to 2010 were no less compelling, and 1965 Charmberlain does an intense job of revisiting a volatile, gut-wrenching time in this country's history that - sadly - still resonates today. I had some concerns that the 1965 story was told from the "white" point of view, but Chamberlain gives both Ellie and her story a dignity and earnestness that easily had you watching even the most shocking happen through the young girl's eyes; so much so, by halfway through the book, whenever I had to put it down I found myself constantly wanting to pick iit up again, whenever life intervened. Even if you can kind of guess where you think the ending is going, there are still surprises waiting - making this a compelling, dramatic read that already has me going over Ms. Chamberlain's backlist for more. (4.5/5 stars)

NOTE: I received a free ARC of this title from NetGalley and the publisher, in exchange for an honest review.

Kayla lost her husband in an accident while their new house was being built. And now she’s ready to move in with her daughter, but it feels like there is something wrong with their house. Or someone doesn’t want them to live there. There was so much involved in this book. It is about family ties and secrets. And the violence that occurred nearby years ago.

I usually don't enjoy dual points of view/two different time periods but this story surprised me and I found myself hooked from the beginning. The subject is a hard one but it's very well handled - social injustice. I won't say anything more for fear of spoiling it. Now that I have read my first book from the pen of Diane Chamberlin I have added her name to my list of authors to catch up with.
My thanks to the publisher St. Martin's Press and to NetGalley for giving me an advance copy in exchange for my honest review.

I thought this was a very well written and engaging story. The story has a dual timeline narrative. In the present, there is Kayla, a grieving widow moving into the house that her and her husband designed (and where he died) while dealing with a mysterious person who definitely doesn't want Kayla and her daughter living where they are. In the past, there is Ellie, an idealistic college age woman who decides to spend a summer trying to register black people to vote in North Carolina (just prior to the passage of the Voting Rights Act), to the shock of most of the people around her.

I have to say that I loved Ellie's chapters a lot more. She was so young and naive and she had no idea the racism ad bigotry that existed within some of her loved ones and she had no idea (until her volunteer work) just how much it would mean for many of the black people in her county to be able to have a say in elections. I found myself feeling a bit bored with Kayla's chapters, at least at first. I didn't fully understand how they connected with Ellie and I didn't understand a lot of the mystery that was happening and why someone was so intent on making her leave.

Eventually though, everything came together and I saw the connection and I was so invested in learning the secrets of the past and how they related to Ellie and Kayla in the present. While this was not one of my favorite Diane Chamberlain novels, this was still a great read.