4.5 stars rounded up to 5 stars

This thriller/mystery surprised me on how much I enjoyed the story and the characters throughout my read. I read a lot of mystery novels and typically can guess what was going to happen throughout, but with this book I felt myself going with the flow of the novel and being surprised about twists throughout. I don't want to share too much about the book because like most thrillers you should go in not knowing very much about what is happening.

Jamie Day did an amazing job and creating characters that were enjoyable to read about while also disliking aspects of what they were doing with their lives. It reminded me a lot of Desperate Housewives and how a lot of their story arcs crossed with one another to reveal secrets going on in the neighborhood. When it comes to books that have a lot going on the story can get a bit confusing, but every aspect of this neighborhood was enjoyable to learn about and uncover.

Quite a few trigger warnings so look those up if you are sensitive to certain topics.

I recommend this book to those that enjoy a thriller/mystery based on a rich neighborhood. Reminiscent of Desperate Housewives, Weeds, and Big Little Lies.

This book was really quite hard for me to read. I'm sad to admit I had to DNF at the half-way point. Not much happening in the first half of the book at all. A few times there were things that caught the readers attention but fell flat when it came to the storyline. I know that a lot of the beginning of the book was to set the stage for the rest of the book but there was never enough to keep my attention. The way the characters acted and spoke seemed very unlikely and I found myself cringing a lot. The characters were not likeable or developed well. This book was definitely not for me. I'm sorry I won't be able to finish it which rarely happens.
2 stars.

This was decent and well written, but I guessed the plot pretty easily. There was no major twists that I hadn’t already figured out. Still a good story though.

I was provided a free advanced copy of this book from @netgalley in exchange for my honest review.
On the exclusive Alton Road, the annual block party is the event of the year. But this year, it will definitely be a blast! 💥😳 The story starts out in the present but leaves us hanging before we cut to a year before. We then follow the residents of this small community, who have many secrets, throughout the year revealing bits and pieces until that fateful party!
This is definitely a crazy story! There are a lot of secrets, a lot of characters doing crazy things, and a lot of things to try to figure out, as the reader. I figured out a few things, but not a lot!
If you're a fan of dark mysteries you'll enjoy this one! Although you know someone(s?) get shot, you don't know who, or if they survive until later!
This is set to be published next Tuesday (18 July) so add it to your TBR and check it out then!
#NetGalley #TheBlockParty

Rich people behaving badly is one of my favorite genres. In this well-to-do neighborhood that seems perfect, everyone is hiding something. We begin at the neighborhood's annual Memorial Day Block Party where there has been a murder. Then we flash back and forth between the previous year's block party and the current, learning more about each neighbor as we go.

I loved this book. It had such great neighborhood drama - total Desperate Housewives vibes.

Thanks to NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press for the chance to read and review this book.

While slow at times, this book is definitely a wild ride with a few jaw drops and “Whhhhaaattttt?!” coming out of my mouth. I thought I had it figured out, but I was nowhere CLOSE to this one. The author did a great job of touching on mental health, domestic abuse, and alcoholism. Great book.

THE BLOCK PARTY by Jamie Day

🏡 🤫 🔫🍷
2 STARS

✨ FOR FANS OF: Big Little Lies, Little Fires Everywhere, domestic thrillers

⭐️WHAT IT’S ABOUT: The residents of the exclusive cul-de-sac on Alton Road are entangled in a web of secrets & scandal utterly unknown to the outside world. On the night of the annual summer block party, there has been a murder. But who did it & why takes readers back one year earlier, as rivalries & betrayals unfold, revealing that nothing is ever as it seems. 

WHAT I LIKED:
🌟 I loved the concept of the block party being a culminating incident with a flashback structure! I was excited to see how the story developed to the point, which had me hooked at the beginning.
🌟 some twists I genuinely did not call, so that pay-off was sometimes good. I won’t name which ones due to spoilers, but there was one in particular that caught me by surprise.

WHAT I DIDN’T:
☁️not much, honestly. I am grateful for the chance to read this ARC but y’all. the writing took me out of the story every five minutes. This book did so much “tell, not show”ing & had the most stilted dialogue I have read in a while. Actual lines include “I’m from Ludhiana in the sixteenth-largest state in India” (spoken) & “he was dressed like a metrosexual” (internal). What? Who speaks like that?
☁️ the passages told in the teen daughter’s voice were especially grating. I also didn’t like that the mother’s passage was in third-person but the daughter’s was in first?
☁️ there are so many predictable plot twists & annoying characters. I considered DNFing at the 25% mark but felt I had to finish it. this book is 3x longer than it needs to be with needless descriptions thrown in or repetitive details.
☁️the book heavily overuses the “woman drinking” trope & sometimes veers into weird, slightly microaggressive territory when they make the Indian husband the only controlling one on the block. They also definitely needed a sensitivity/cultural reader for the Indian content— why would they make such a big deal about having people over for Thanksgiving for “the holiday season” when they’re Hindu & Diwali is at basically the exact same time? and then they serve “some dish that looks like paneer”? This, of course, is my own bias, but it was so glaring to me that someone was trying to include a character of color without actually looking anything up.

⭐️OVERALL: I picked this up hoping for a beach read— I can stand some so-so writing if the plot is good, but this book had little pay-off for the pages invested. I’d skip it, honestly.

Thanks to @netgalley & @stmartinspress for the ARC in exchange for my honest reviews.

‼️ Check trigger warnings, as always.

Thank you to NetGalley for an advanced digital copy of this book.

It is Memorial Day and time for the annual Block Party for the residents of the cul-de-sac called Alton Road. But something terrible happens this night, and to find out what happened and to whom, and why, we go back to the party the year before.

A new couple has been invited to attend and make one final walk-through of the largest house on the block, hopefully to make an offer. But when one of the husbands meets the couple, he has a strange reaction to the wife in the new couple. He has strayed before, and his wife is super alert, but no one there can miss the reactions of these two people!

But there are a LOT of secrets hidden behind these expensive closed doors, and over the course of the year many of them are revealed and the women of the block become closer with every revelation. The young people, including three about to be high school seniors, have their own secrets, too, and they all come to light, some with devastating consequences.

As you get to know these wealthy people, you realize their lives are not as perfect as they seem. Some you will like and others you will not, but they all make an impact on this good read.

Drama, drama, drama! If that is your thing, you will probably love this book. This book is your classic everyone-has-their-secrets neighborhood drama with a side of murder. I feel like based on that, I SHOULD have loved it, but I had a very hard time getting into this one. Half of the chapters are told by Lettie, who is a teenager who talks like a teenager, thinks like a teenager, and well, acts like a teenager. I'm not saying this whole book read like Young Adult, but enough of it did where I felt a bit blindsided and disappointed.

Okay, so I didn't end up loving this one. But it ended up not being as bad as the first 10 or so chapters had me thinking (look, I REALLY hate surprise teenager chapters). The drama was over-the-top, but in that way that made you have no idea what was going to come next. My favorite thing about this book was not knowing who died or why until near the end. Oh and the use of the scorpion fable!

Thank you NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I love mysteries/thrillers and read tons of them, but this one was just hard for me to read. I get that there has to be suspense for the story, but this one was just really hard to follow. It flips between 2 narrators, neither of which are relatable to me. Lettie, the teenager, just seems whiny annoying tone and Alex, her mother, seems a drunk, busybody. Normally when I can't get into a story I just stop reading, but in this case I did want to know what happened at the end so I finished it. I was surprised at the ending, but it just seemed like it took a long time to get to the resolution.

I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own. This review is based on an ARC from NetGalley, courtesy of the publisher.

I really liked the premise of this book. It reminded me so much of Desperate Housewives. The pace of the book was great and I enjoyed the different perspectives. The only thing I had trouble with was believing Lettie was a 17/18-year-old girl. That being said, I loved her story line, it just didn’t sound like a young adult.

The Block Party is a delicious, soapy and sometimes irreverent take on an unscale neighborhood as they navigate their separate dysfunctions. While there is a large cast, the author has made it easy to follow each family leading too a terrible event which was destined. Really well done Jamie Day!

Many thanks to NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for this ARC!

Thank you to Netgalley, the publisher and the author, for an ARC of this book, in exchange for an honest review.
The premise of the book drew me in but once I started reading it, I just couldn’t get into it at all.
I wish the author, publisher and all those promoting the book much success and connections with the right readers.

📚 #BOOKREVIEW 📚
The Block Party by Jamie Day
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ / Pages: 367 / Genre: Domestic Thriller
Release Date: July 18, 2023

Alton Road is that block in the neighborhood with the best houses and the most successful neighbors, where everything and everyone is just picture perfect—on the outside anyway. All hell breaks loose during the most memorable Memorial Day block party ever. Weaving back and forth between before the party and after, the characters and story take shape slowly and then speed up with a crash landing into the party itself. I really enjoyed this fast-paced domestic thriller. This is the perfect beach read to take on your summer vacation.

Thank you @stmartinspress and @netgalley for the advanced copy of this book.

Read if you like:
📺 The Desperate Housewife Vibes
2️⃣ Two POV
🎊 Drama Surrounding a Party
⏳ Past and Present Timelines

This one was such a juicy thriller with so many characters but told through 2 POV the mother and the daughter that are embroiled in the neighborhood drama.

I loved how the book started out in the present at the block party and meeting the characters and starting to see dysfunctional and points that our narrator may be unreliable then going back one year and bouncing between Lettie and Alex’s POVs!

If you are looking for a juicy, gossip worthy, suspenseful summer thriller I highly recommend checking this one out! Thank you so much to SMP for my ARC of this one!

A lot of people live on Alton Road and they all have connections to each other. Every Memorial Day Alton Road hosts an annual block party. This year there is a murder. The story then jumps back to the previous year's block party. There is a huge list of who could have been murdered, and also who the murderer was.

The story mainly focuses on Alex and her daughter Lettie. There is a lot of drama in the neighborhood including divorce, cheating, alcoholism, and family dynamics.

A Memorial Day BBQ in the exclusive Meadowbrook, Alton Road cul-de-sac is the scene of a murder. Who dies? Who did it? Why did that person do it?

The timeline moves from present day back to a year ago and we get all of the juicy gossip, and secrets about the characters, Brooke, Mandy, Emily, and Alex and their families. The story is told through different points of view. I found the best part of the story to be the Meadowbrook Online Community Page, think a snarky NextDoor site, that contributes comments and observations.

The story is fast moving, perfect for a fun summer read.

Thank you to NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for an ARC. The review is my own.

There is the hint of a murder at the beginning of this novel then we are taken back and go through the year leading up to the current time. That year of background explores the people living on the cul-de-sac. We read of divorces in the making, surprised parentage, desire for teenage revenge, blackmail, a closet alcoholic, one addicted to porn, spousal abuse, and relationships not being what they appear. I would think one could investigate the dwellings on any street in general and explore similar circumstances. We are given a number of possible villains. There is a revelation near the end that we had no way of anticipating that clarified the murder issue.

This is a novel for readers who would like a dive into the people and relationships in an upper scale neighborhood, none of which are likable. Secrets come out, some of which could be deadly. The build up is slow and tedious. Who likes to read angry dialogue again and again? The last bit of the book has good suspense and action, however. The novel is a good explorations of the damage caused when so many secrets are kept.

I received a complimentary egalley of this book from the publisher. My comments are an independent and honest review.

Many thanks to NetGalley, Jamie Day and St. Martin’s Press for the ARC of this intoxicating (pun intended) thriller! Loved reading this twisty thriller during the summer time - could not get enough!! I rated this book as a 4 star, but I would like to round up to 4.5 ⭐️. Highly recommend!!

This story is definitely a lot more character driven, which isn’t always my favorite but it was definitely scandalous and fun to read.⁣
⁣
We start out this story at the Memorial Weekend Block Party. ⁣
⁣
We follow the Kumars- the son got kicked out of college, mom and dad are caught several times in heated arguments, is there domestic violence or just a spat?⁣
⁣
The Foxes- psychologists/psychiatrists, with a 17 year old daughter who appears like the goth child that got suspended from school to finds interest in her college neighbor. Mom is an alcoholic, and this couple haven’t had sex in a while. They don’t communicate. ⁣
⁣
The Adairs- attractive, successful parents, two high school boys who are also brilliant, except the wife is worried the husband might be cheating, and one of the sons is really struggling living in his brothers spotlight. ⁣
⁣
The Thompsons- are in the middle of an awful divorce and haven’t noticed that their daughter has gotten herself in a mess of trouble. ⁣
⁣
&& bad ass Brooke is a widow, a black widow maybe? Her husband died in a yacht accident and she’s sassy and wild and always knows the tea. ⁣
⁣
The end result of all of the drama along the way, was nothing that I expected. This was a wild ride of drama, drama, drama in this neighborhood. Nothing is ever what it seems.⁣
⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️