Breaking the Dark, Lisa Jewell

Breaking the Dark opening lines: Jessica turns onto her side and blinks into the darkness. The drapes are wide open, but the sky outside is so dark that they may as well be shut.

Breaking the Dark

My blurb:

Is there such a thing as perfection? And can evil exist alongside it? These are two of the questions Jessica Jones will have to answer when tasked to find out what is wrong with two teenagers. Their mother can sense they are not the same people, and she knows that Jessica will be the correct person to discover why they have come back from their holiday different.

Breaking the Dark

Meet Jessica Jones: a private investigator and retired super hero based out of Hell’s Kitchen, Manhattan, who goes from job to job as a hard living, rough talking, loner.

And then a wealthy Upper East Side woman pays her a visit. Amber Randall is concerned about her twin sixteen-year-olds, Lark and Fox, who have acted and looked very different since they returned from spending the summer with their British father in the UK. She tells Jessica that her children have unnaturally perfect skin for teenagers and have lost all the tics and habits that made them who they were. They are not Lark and Fox, she tells Jessica. Something has happened to them.
To find out more, Jessica travels to Essex to talk to their father and once there meets Belle who is living a curiously isolated existence in a run-down farmhouse with her guardian Debra. Jessica knows that Lark and Fox had spent the summer with Belle—but can this unworldly teenager really be responsible for Lark and Fox’s new personas?
Jessica soon discovers that, behind Belle and Debra, evil geniuses are playing a dangerous game with technology in order to make the world a “better place”, not caring who gets hurt, maimed or even killed in the process. Can Jessica stop them from wreaking destruction on a whole generation of young people? Nothing is certain in Lisa Jewell’s gripping and most imaginative novel yet.
My verdict:

I chose to read this book because I am a fan of Lisa Jewell. I am clueless when it comes to Marvel, but if any book would get me interested, this would be it! A well written story surrounding Jessica Jones, her real life, and the story of how evil can truly exist in the pursuit of perfection

About the Author:
Lisa Jewell was born in London in 1968. Her first novel,  Ralph’s Party,  was published in 1999. It was the best-selling debut novel of the year. Since then she has published another sixteen novels, most lately a number of dark psychological thrillers, including  The Girls  and  Then She Was Gone .
Lisa is a top 10  New York Times  and number one  Sunday Times  author who has been published worldwide in over twenty-five languages. She lives in north London with her husband, two daughters, two cats, two guinea pigs and the best dog in the world.
Read an extract:

JESSICA TURNS ONTO HER SIDE and blinks into the darkness. The drapes are wide open, but the sky outside is so dark that they may as well be shut. It is not nighttime, but a storm is brewing over Hell’s Kitchen, black and bruised and heavy.

The clock by her bed tells her that it is one minute past nine.

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Publishing information:
ISBN 9781529918175
Format Trade Paperback
Published July 2024

Penguin Random House South Africa sent me this novel to review.

See the links below for blog posts I published on August 18:

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8 thoughts on “Breaking the Dark, Lisa Jewell

  1. Don’t know about the author..but I am a fan of crime stories. Definitely gotta find the book in Kindle version. I have been reading Roy Grace series by Peter James…I bet you know him too.

  2. I never read a book from Lisa Jewell, and picked up Breaking the Dark due to the Amazon preview for it interesting me and me being not only a Marvel fangirl but a major fan of Jessica Jones. Lisa Jewell did a brilliant job and it was almost as if she had created Jessica Jones and the ALIaS comic she debuted from herself. I especially love all the attention to detail on the ways Jessica isn’t a typical hero and how it’s both a flaw yet a great strength to her character as she nevertheless even if not doing it ideally tries to do the right thing in the end. I will definitely be reading Lisa Jewell’s original works in the future.

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