Every now and then along comes a story that has you laughing and cringing at the same time at the antics of a dysfunctional family digging themselves into more trouble time and time again.
I didn't take the Adler family too serious with all their carry on from one dismal decision to another more dismal.
Overall an enjoyable quick funny read with gentle barbs showing the follies of modern lifestyles.
An independent review hanks to NetGalley / Gallery Books

"So many secrets. So many lies. And so much anger. How had our family gotten so messed up?"

The Perfect Family is my first book by Robyn Harding, so I wasn't sure what to expect. I was put off in the early part of the book by hating all of the Adlers, the family around whom the book is based. This is with the possible exception of Tarryn, who with her strong feminist sex worker politics reminded me a little of myself before age softened the hard-line absolutism. It would be remiss of me to fail to say though, Tarryn is a bit of a brat: "Everyone thought I was a bitch and steered clear. I'd grown to enjoy my hostile outsider status."

Tarryn's attitude is unsurprising really, when both of her parents (Viv and Thomas) are selfish, judgemental and secretive. This is reflected in their parenting: "My daughter had once been a cheerful, bubbly animal lover. It was hard to imagine the surly troll who lived in my basement vaccinating puppies."

As the family is rocked by repeated attacks from an unidentified assailant (well multiple, simultaneous assailants with different gripes, which stretches the bounds of believable quite a bit) they come to see the harm they do to each other through their secrets and selfishness. Status or "bragging rights" becomes less important to Viv and Thomas as the novel progresses. Both of their (equally flawed) children, Eli and Tarryn, grow up through the family's shared experience of fear and self-loathing. In a series of reveals prompted by a near-death experience, they come clean with each other about the things that they're hiding. Well, all bar Tarryn, who undercuts this by deciding: "It wasn't the right time to tell her that her daughter was a sex worker and that it had just turned dangerous."

The Perfect Family made me want to go throw eggs at houses that "[h]ide the garbage, any signs of ugliness" so they can start to make the journey from lives that look good on the outside (to hide the rot within) to ones where they behave like decent human beings. If only this sort of growth and development was as simple as Harding makes it out to be...

Excellent psychological drama.

The Adlers seem the perfect family - Mum Dad and two kids, one in college, one in the last year of High School. But it's a veneer. The family is fractured. All four have secrets they are keeping hidden. Someone begins to target the family's house and property, with escalating vandalism.
Who is behind the attacks? And whose secrets are the source of the motivation for the attacker(s)?
One to keep you guessing, and one that was hard to put down.

Thank you Netgalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read this book for an honest review.

Thomas,Viv,Eli and Tarryn are the so called the perfect family living in an upmarket home in a quiet wealthy suburb . Each family member with their own dirty little secrets. Who is targeting them in their home with acts of petty vandalism and for what. The vandalism gets worse the police are not interested and each family member starts to break apart under the strain . The reader is waiting for the inevitable tragedy to happen. The father tries to make his home a fortress to no avail. The book is well written from all 4 family members perspective . This is a good read and will keep you guessing . 4 stars

The Adler’s are the picture perfect family. Perfect marriage, perfect kids and the perfect home. With Eli off to college And Tarryn almost finished school Thomas and Viv both have high powered jobs and are getting ready to have a empty home. But perfection comes at a price and every family member has their secrets.

What’s starts as some kids egging the front door shortly leads to a smoke bomb, broken windows and punctured tires the family set into panic mode trying to understand why they are being singled out. The police assure them it’s just teenagers and it’s nothing to worry about. But Thomas and Eli take it into their own hands to get tp the bottom of why!

From the outside their like is perfect but their secrets are destroying them one by one. How long until someone really gets hurt?

A very interesting read. Reads from the first person point of view, but from multiple characters that works really well.
When your house is egged, cleaned up, then egged again it becomes annoying, but when it starts to escalate it becomes very scary.
With each member of the family having their own little secrets, it’s hard to know who is actually the intended target.
With each characters own narrative, we get to see how they are thinking and feeling, especially about their own lives and that of their families.
I quite enjoyed this read and found it thought provoking, as you never really know what is inside someone else’s head and why they may do the things they do, and in this case, the things you don’t know what they do.
Thanks to Netgalley and publishers for a copy of this book.

This book gave me constant anxiety. I want to say it was in a thrilling, can't wait to find out the twist way, but it was mostly just a gross feeling in my stomach.

A dysfunctional all-american suburban family is subject to increasing acts of mischief, beginning with eggs on the window and similar pranks and escalating to vandalism and violence.

Everyone is harbouring a dark secret, everyone could be the target of the neighborhood hooligans, and it's driving them all mad...

Horrible people getting what they deserve or something else? Inexpertly woven together and unsatisfying at the reveal.

This is my first opportunity to read Robyn Harding’s work, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. What I found was quality writing, a compelling plot with plenty of threads and drama and a book I didn’t want to put down!
The premise is simple: an outwardly perfect family is deeply imperfect and becomes victim to their own secrets and lies. Lots of drama and suspense (whose secret life was the cause of escalating pranks?) but it was not dark and sinister. It’s strange to say that in a tale of mistrust and broken relationships, not to mention sex, blackmail and hazing rituals gone wrong, there was a wicked sense of fun. I really enjoyed this book despite a slightly cheesy ending.
Fans of domestic suspense will enjoy this book, and it would make fantastic holiday reading (I will definitely put this author on my list!)
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Suspense is one of my favourite genres, and this novel fit the bill perfectly. I love that it was told in the point of view of each family member in the story...and they all have secrets from each other.

My only nitpick is the ending seemed a bit abrupt and left me wanting. Other than that, it was a great read.

Thank you NetGalley and Simon & Schuster Australia for giving me the opportunity to review this edgy, well-paced ARC.

A suspense drama based on the perfect family that are not so perfect after all. Everyone one has a secret that they are hiding from each other. The story is told in the voices of each member of the Adler family, there is a lot going on that keeps you wanting to read about there foibles but nothing dramatic enough to make it an un-put-downable book.

It was an enjoyable enough read, not too unrealistic considering what goes on in families as well as out in the world with pranksters, bribers etc. these days and the ending even though it felt cut off and quick to end the last sentence leaves you on edge. Will there be a sequel?

The Perfect Family is a suspense novel told in the four voices of the Adler family – parents Thomas and Viv and their children Eli and Tarryn. To their neighbours, the Adlers are the perfect family, but each of them has a secret, and even the most seemingly innocuous secret of them all represents danger to their home and family. It starts with their porch being pelted by eggs, which is easily dismissed as kids pranking. But the attacks escalate. The police and school still believe it’s just kids acting out and are fairly powerless to stop them. The best security systems are ineffective too. How are the Adlers going to stop the attacks while protecting their reputations, and more importantly, while protecting the ones they love? What I enjoyed most about The Perfect Family is the sense that something like this isn’t too far-fetched. In our busy, competitive lives, secrets can bloom, and things can spiral out of control. The pacing was good too, and though the conclusion (for me) didn’t quite live up to the build-up, it was a fun read.

This was super addictive and fast-paced but ultimately a little light on with the drama.

The story is about a family who seem perfect on the outside but who are all hiding secrets from one another.

As far as those secrets go, they were pretty bland. Nothing particularly new and original, so nothing particularly captivating. I was curious about them, but they all came out pretty fast so there wasn't a lot of tension in that respect.

I enjoyed how the pranking on the family started small and slowly started to escalate, but it never quite got as intense as I hoped for. It was also a bit bizarre that those responsible were called out early on but it was still somehow drawn out into a mystery? It felt a bit messy to me. I wanted this story to go so much further than it did.

The story was written well enough to draw me in and keep me reading addictively, but there just wasn't quite enough substance to leave me satisfied. A decent read, but not quite as clever as I had hoped for.

The Adler’s have a wonderful life, in a lovely home, other than the fact that every one of them are keeping big secrets from each other. But Thomas and Viv Adler demand appearances to be kept up, so no-ones talking. When the pranks first start, they seem like inconvenient, childish episodes – eggs thrown at the house, then an apple….but as things start to escalate when Thomas finds his tires slashed, then worse, each of the Adler’s starts to wonder if it’s their secret that’s to blame. Someone is blackmailing Thomas, Viv has been committing a crime, Eli stood by while something terrible happened at college and Tarryn knows someone has discovered what she’s doing at night. But which secret has incited an aggrieved party to want to harm them?

The Perfect Family was an addictive thriller that had me scrambling to figure out who could be behind the terrorizing of the Adler family. Because there were so many different secrets being kept, I was never sure whether it was one person or a mixture of different people! I really enjoyed that there were several interlocking pieces of the puzzle, and we got to see each character tell their own secret, it kept the entire book intense and interesting.

If you’re looking for a domestic thriller that keeps you guessing until the very end, pick this one up.

Many thanks to Netgalley and Publishers Simon & Schuster for the opportunity to read this new book by Robyn Harding and for my opinion and review.

The Adler's live in the perfect house in an upper middle class area. The family look as though they too are perfect but …….

The read begins with an unknown person pouring fuel onto the Adler's garden hedge setting it alight. The arsonist has a grudge against the Adler household but who or why isn't revealed until almost at the end which heightens the suspense. However, there are several Adler house attackers whereby eggs are thrown at Thomas' car and the house as well as other missiles and tyres being slashed and a dead rat put inside the house. Meanwhile the Police aren't much help at all, making excuses that the incidents are probably by kids. However, the Adler house is the only one in the street affected.

Thomas Adler, guilty of getting drunk at a buck's night, he passed out. He is photographed with a stripper, a lap dancer for whom, not remembering anything much of that night, believes that he possibly had an involvement with the woman who has started to blackmail him. Ridiculous sums of money are demanded and initially Thomas is terrified of his work position being affected and his wife, Vivian finding out. However, when one of the men from the night tells him that he had passed out he is less concerned and drags out negotiations with the blackmailer with surprising results. Thomas Adler discovers that as successful as he is, not many of his workmates like him, arrogant and self serving just some of the negatives he has to come to terms with.

All the while Vivian Adler knows something is wrong with her husband and suspects an affair. Her relationship with her daughter Tarryn and son Eli are also pretty fractured. Tarryn is a typical moody teenager but to help her unfulfilled mental state has an alter ego that she flaunts over the internet. Eli has come home from college refusing to return due to an event that occurred for which he is unable to reveal to his parents as he has been threatened by the perpetrators of the incident.

Vivian has a home decorating and consulting business which is becoming successful after a lot of hard work, however with her suspecting that Thomas is unfaithful to her she has developed a bad habit, she is a kleptomaniac. Houses she goes into, a business she visits, something always ends up in her handbag. This problem is heightened when she steals a bag of pills from one of her best clients that sadly has a son with a drug problem. The consequences of this action is one cause for many of the family's problems. Vivian goes to see this client, Dolly who has moved away and during this meeting the full extent of their son's drug addiction and dealing is revealed. Returning home, Vivian goes to her secret stash and finds the bag with the pills.

Many things start to fit into place. The boy who burnt the hedge, admits it to his father who in the end contacts Thomas where a mutual agreement comes about. Tarryn's provocative antics over the internet come to an end by her friends and Eli, after his mother shoots him believing he is the intruder, at last is brave enough to reveal his secret.

Vivian and Thomas realise that family is their priority but can they change from their superficial lifestyle?

This is an entertaining domestic thriller. It’s dramatic, suspenseful and full of tension.

I found the characters unlikeable and frustrating but that only made the story better as I was constantly changing my thoughts on who was the reason the house was being targeted.

I enjoyed reading from 3 POVs and learning their secrets.

I wanted more from the ending, although it was a surprise it was too quick and wrapped up too nicely.

I have read some of Robyn Harding’s other books and I will continue to.

Thank you Netgalley, Simon & Schuster Australia and Robyn Harding for this ARC.

The perfect family novel is a weirdly warped story. A family of four living in a pristine house, in an equally nice neighbourhood. Each family member on the outside looks and acts like a normal human but each one of them is hiding a secret of some kind, some worse than the others. Once the family home gets targeted, each family member severely doubts their secret and wonders if it's their secret that is causing harm.

I love the storyline of this book but some parts of this book I wasn't keen on. Even though written in 4 perspectives, I like that some characters' situations cross over onto the other characters' side. So in some cases you get two views on a particular situation. I like this idea as it's original and I don't think I've read another book that's done this.

I enjoyed the twists and unexpected events that occurred. The secrets that each one of the family members had, and I was super surprised on how well they were able to hide their secrets from one another.

The parts I wasn't keen on were; the plot, who did what and why, and the ending. I won't go into much detail as to why. But I was left slightly confused and desperately wanting more.

Thank you to Netgalley, Simon and Schuster Australia and Robyn Harding.

I did enjoy this to a point. The multiple POV's was well done and the twisted storyline that seemed to keep turning throughout the whole book. I wasn't really impressed with the wind up and resolution to each person's ending with "who did what" and I thought the actual end was poor. I think with so much going on the whole book I was expecting a bit more of a BANG for an ending.

The Adler's seem to be the perfect family - but they all have something to hide...

This book caught my attention straight away and held it right to the end. It was an entertaining, enjoyable read - as I have come to expect from Robyn Harding's novels.

Thankyou to Natgalley and Simon and Schuster Australia for the opportunity to read and review this book.
⭐⭐⭐⭐ Stars

Great book that is well written and keeps the suspense going. Some questions are left unanswered at the end and hence the four star rating.

Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC.

This was great. An easy read that kept my interest from the start to the very last page.

Thomas and Viv are comfortable middle aged parents of two almost adult children.
However everyone in this family is keeping at least one secret, and the secrets are tearing them apart.
With external attacks that could be coming from many sources Robyn kept me guessing all the way.

The family members are probably guilty of jumping to quite a few conclusions and the police don't lend much assistance. This all adds to the suspense.

Thanks to Netgalley for an advance reading copy.

I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.