The Girl Below

Apr 08, 2013 Blair rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: ghostly-and-magical, mystery-thriller-etc, past-and-present, to-buy-physical-copy, 2013-release

This is one of those irritating instances when I really wish I could give a three-and-a-half-star rating. The Girl Below is an odd book - a combination of elements which never quite form a satisfying whole - yet parts of it are hugely enjoyable, and bits of it are actually excellent. It doesn't fit into any genre classification, really: it's definitely not chick-lit, despite the chatty, amusing narrative, but it's too light to be literary fiction. It's probably a family drama more than anything...more This is one of those irritating instances when I really wish I could give a three-and-a-half-star rating. The Girl Below is an odd book - a combination of elements which never quite form a satisfying whole - yet parts of it are hugely enjoyable, and bits of it are actually excellent. It doesn't fit into any genre classification, really: it's definitely not chick-lit, despite the chatty, amusing narrative, but it's too light to be literary fiction. It's probably a family drama more than anything else, but it's far better and more interesting than that description sounds. It has a bit of a mystery thrown into the mixture, but that's not enough to drive the plot on its own, and finally there are some elements of supernatural and fantasy. If anything is the book's downfall, it's these parts, which are included almost apologetically - the author obviously wanted to avoid the book being categorised as fantasy, but the result is that certain things just seem kind of ridiculous.

The main character/narrator is Suki, recently returned to London after ten years living in New Zealand. Rootless, unemployed, sleeping on the couch of a sort-of-friend whose flatmates hate her: she is drifting, and her wandering leads her to revisit the area she grew up in, searching for the London she used to know. There, she discovers that Peggy, an old family friend who is now gravely ill, still lives in the same building, and following an impulsive visit she slowly starts to become involved with Peggy's family - her daughter Pippa, who Suki remembers as a glamorous babysitter, and Pippa's sixteen-year-old son Caleb, whose typical teenage-boy behaviour is worrying his mother. Suki finds herself roped into giving Caleb some sort of guidance, despite feeling completely ill-equipped to do so. Scenes from the present day are intercut with memories: Suki keeps being drawn back to a party her parents held when she was a little girl, and the night her family became briefly trapped in an old air raid shelter.

The best thing about The Girl Below is the characterisation of Suki. I really came to love her and feel I knew her over the course of the story, which, between the present day and a number of flashbacks, covers most of the key points of her life. So much of this is painfully real - her isolation, boredom and dissatisfaction upon arriving in London; her estrangement from her father, and inability to fit into his new life; the messy entanglements of her past relationships, all unsuccessful; the raw pain of finding her 'best friend' from schooldays has changed beyond recognition and doesn't want to know her anymore. Looking through other reviews, readers' opinions on Suki seem to be split between those who found her unbearably selfish and those who related to her enormously, and I definitely fall into the latter category. This was a great book to read now, when I'm the same age as the character and feeling similarly unmoored in life - to be honest, it made feel better about being low-achieving and generally uncertain. I also loved how Suki and Caleb's relationship was portrayed: although the narrative skirts around some difficult topics here, it stays just the right side of uncomfortable, and their interactions are totally believable.

When the narrative started touching on Suki's mental health problems, I assumed this subject would link in with her supernatural experiences - that it would turn out she was having hallucinations, or that the dreams (or whatever they were) were connected to unresolved family issues and memories she'd repressed. That would have been a far more satisfying and interesting explanation than (view spoiler)... The way all of this was resolved just became silly in the end, and felt rather flimsy. It didn't ruin the book for me, but it did take the edge off what I felt could have been a great true-to-life character study.

At its best, The Girl Below reminded me of Siri Hustvedt's work and The Legacy by Kirsten Tranter. All its strongest moments are to do with character development, and I really felt it would have been better as a plotless story about life as it is: there are some wonderful observations about growing up, relationships and coming to terms with your own failings. I would recommend this book, but I'd say it's best saved for a holiday or long journey, some situation when you won't end up thinking too deeply or critically about the daft bits. I'll also be keeping an eye out for Zander's future novels.(less)

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Apr 10, 2013 Levian rated it 2 of 5 stars

after spending 10 years in New Zealand with the hope of reuniting with her remarried father, 30-year-old Suki returned to London, where she grew up in. she walked by the old building where she once lived with her parents. out of curiosity, she visited Peggy, a neighbor and family friend that still lived in the building. Peggy was bedridden with old-age, where Pippa, her daughter hired a nurse, Amanda to attend to her. when Amanda left, Pippa asked Suki to stand in for her, which she accepted rel...more

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Jul 05, 2012 Kimmy rated it 3 of 5 stars

(From http://www.pingwings.ca/the-girl-below/)

Review copy provided by the publisher in conjunction with TLC Book Tours

This was a very absorbing read, one that I had a tough time putting down. The story takes place when Suki returns to London after living in New Zealand for a decade, and I immediately got the impression that Suki was struggling with all aspects of her life: friendships, relationships, job prospects, family, etc.

What really drew me in were the early chapters that flashed back to...more (From http://www.pingwings.ca/the-girl-below/)

Review copy provided by the publisher in conjunction with TLC Book Tours

This was a very absorbing read, one that I had a tough time putting down. The story takes place when Suki returns to London after living in New Zealand for a decade, and I immediately got the impression that Suki was struggling with all aspects of her life: friendships, relationships, job prospects, family, etc.

What really drew me in were the early chapters that flashed back to her childhood, to a night involving a party thrown by her parents and to a trip to the air raid shelter in the garden. Her tenuous grasp on these memories gave off an unsettling atmosphere, partly because, as glimpsed through Suki-as-a-child, she doesn’t quite understand all that she sees and hears, and so as a reader, I was filling in blanks and found I couldn’t explain some of the things that Suki remembered. I also found myself questioning the reliability of Suki’s memories, wondering how much faith I could put in the accuracy of these remembered events, and I liked that uncertainty.

I loved the movement between Suki’s past and present, and the way it drew out the story. Present-day Suki bounces around the couches of some old friends before settling in with an old friend’s family: Peggy was Suki’s neighbour in her parents’ old place, and Suki winds up staying with Peggy’s daughter, Pippa.

Pippa is married to Ari and has a son, Caleb. They end up asking Suki to stay and keep an eye on Caleb while taking Peggy to Greece to visit Ari’s family, and partly because she has nowhere else to go, Suki agrees. Pippa hopes that Suki can talk some sense into Caleb, as she senses that they may be similarly troubled.

Things become stranger and stranger, and the supernatural vibe to the story begins to pick up, culminating with Suki and Caleb going off to Greece with Pippa’s brother when they learn that Peggy’s health is even worse than they thought.

I loved the spooky, supernatural atmosphere that built throughout the book, and the descriptions of Greece and Ari’s family home were so vivid and wonderful. I also liked learning about Suki’s past through flashbacks, particularly the chapters that focused on her childhood and on her relationship with her parents.

There were a few things that frustrated me about Suki, like her drinking and drug use, and her strange relationship with Caleb. However, while I didn’t like these some of the things that Suki did, I think they helped to demonstrate how poorly she coped with her feelings of isolation and loneliness. She wasn’t always likeable, but I felt for her and wanted her to find happiness. It’s difficult to like a character who does unlikable things, but I didn’t see Suki as a bad person, and I think that’s a credit to the author that she has written a complex character who I couldn’t help but root for through it all.

I didn’t quite get all the answers I wanted out of this book, but maybe others will be able to read more into things than I was. Overall, I thought this was well-written and entertaining, and I recommend it. I would be interested to read more by Bianca Zander in the future.(less)

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Jun 18, 2012 Allison Campbell rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: review-copies

THE GIRL BELOW is an extraordinary first novel suffused with a creepy surrealism that makes the pages turn themselves. The main character, Suki Piper, is twenty-eight years old when she returns to London after over a decade in New Zealand, where she sought her absent father following her mother's death. There is no magical reunion, but Suki remains there, working and sharing a flat. By the time she returns to London, her roots there have all but dried up, and she crashes, increasingly unwelcome,...more THE GIRL BELOW is an extraordinary first novel suffused with a creepy surrealism that makes the pages turn themselves. The main character, Suki Piper, is twenty-eight years old when she returns to London after over a decade in New Zealand, where she sought her absent father following her mother's death. There is no magical reunion, but Suki remains there, working and sharing a flat. By the time she returns to London, her roots there have all but dried up, and she crashes, increasingly unwelcome, on an old friend's couch. A visit to her childhood flat folds her into the family of Pippa, her old babysitter, whose ailing mother, Peggy, needs care. Pippa also hopes that Suki will be a good influence on her surly teenaged son, Caleb. Suki has her own demons: surreal experiences that might be hallucinations or might be time travel. She continues to be pulled back into a horrifying time in her childhood involving a debauched party thrown by her parents and a visit to a creepy WWII bunker. She shares these hauntings/visions/time travels with Caleb and is dismayed when they follow her to Greece, where she has joined Pippa at Peggy's deathbed.

Zander shifts easily between Suki's childhood, her time in New Zealand, and the present. Suki is a fascinating character, a woman vaguely haunted by her past and unable to grasp her present. Her jobs are meaningless, her friends superficial, her boyfriends hopeless. She stays in New Zealand despite her father's rejection of her, even running errands for him and his new wife just to feel a part of something. Her hard-partying life doesn't fill the void she has felt since that mysterious incident at the age of eight, and she drifts into Pippa's family without really meaning to: Pippa pulls her in and Suki doesn't resist. Pippa's brother, Harold, offers a look at her future: "The thought of ending up like his when I was in my forties, still stewing over what my parents had or hadn't done to me as a child, was dismal, and it struck me that there had to be a cut-off point, where it all stopped being their fault and became my own" (p. 198, uncorrected proof). This is the point of crisis that Suki has reached, and it is not clear at first whether her visits to the past will stop her drifting, heal old wounds, and prevent her ending up like Harold. Zander uses, to great effect, several images from Suki's childhood to evoke dread. Every time the Wendy tent appears, or she hears the scraping of the bunker hatch, is chilling. Even the hot sun in Greece can't dispel the Gothic gloom. Eventually the threads come together to suggest a future for Suki, but be warned: if you like every little thing tied up in a neat bow in the last chapter, you may find the ending unsatisfying. Since the novel deals extensively with the unreliability of memory, I closed the book (which I could not put down and thus read in one sitting) feeling as though Suki's journey had been told in a complete and beautiful way. I highly recommend this novel.

Source disclosure: I received an uncorrected proof through LibraryThing's Early Reviewer Program.(less)

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Jun 18, 2012 Leigh Edleman rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: contemporary, fiction, mystery

I easily read The Girl Below in a weekend–partially because it was fairly fast-paced and easy to read and partially because I enjoyed it so much. It’s the perfect mix of mystery and fiction–just enough mystery to be intriguing and keep you wondering, but light enough to allow you to focus on the characters and their story as well.

The Girl Below centers around Suki Piper, who’s in her late 20′s and has returned to London, where she was born and raised, after spending over 10 years in New Zealand...more I easily read The Girl Below in a weekend–partially because it was fairly fast-paced and easy to read and partially because I enjoyed it so much. It’s the perfect mix of mystery and fiction–just enough mystery to be intriguing and keep you wondering, but light enough to allow you to focus on the characters and their story as well.

The Girl Below centers around Suki Piper, who’s in her late 20′s and has returned to London, where she was born and raised, after spending over 10 years in New Zealand. Suki’s mother passed away just before she fled to New Zealand, where she unsuccessfully tries to reconnect with her father, who left the family’s home to go on a business trip many years ago, but never returned.

Upon deciding to leave New Zealand and return “home,” Suki’s struggling in every sense of the word–to make ends meet, to find a job, to keep a roof over her head and to come to terms with her past. She temporarily crashes on a friend’s couch while job searching, and one day decides to visit her childhood flat. She hopes to reconnect with her old neighbors, Pippa, who babysat her as a child, and Pippa’s mom Peggy. But Suki finds that Peggy’s ailing and Pippa, along with her husband and teenage son, own their own home nearby. Her visit also stirs up a haunting childhood memory of a crazy party her parents hosted and a WWII bunker in their backyard. She then starts to piece together memories from her childhood, in order to find out what really happened that night.

The book’s chapters alternate between memories from Suki’s childhood and her current day life, which I think contributed to the book’s success. I liked reading about parts of her childhood through the eyes of a child, in an effort to put together pieces of the puzzle from that mysterious evening and the aftermath. And I was just as absorbed in her current day life, as she gets pulled into Pippa and Peggy’s lives when she agrees to first be a caretaker for Peggy while her nurse is away, and then a babysitter of sorts for Pippa’s angst-ridden teenage son, and then finally, as a caretaker again in Greece when Peggy falls ill during the family’s vacation.

The only aspect of the novel that gave me pause was the bit of surrealism or magic that Suki encounters as she comes to terms with the past. This magical element helps Suki bridge the past and present in order to resolve the mystery and comes to terms with her past and her family, and I think it worked here–but I don’t think resorting to the supernatural is something that most novels can or should do.

The Girl Below is Bianca Zander’s first novel. Zander, similar to Suki, was born in Britain and lives in New Zealand. Zander’s writing was smart and surprising. To be honest, I wished the book was longer. I really liked Suki’s character, partially because of her plentiful flaws (perhaps almost too plentiful), which made her seem real. I liked the dynamic between the characters and how the story wasn’t at all predictable. Overall, I think The Girl Below is a great light read–perfect for your summer reading list!
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Mar 22, 2012 Kirstin rated it 5 of 5 stars

The Girl Below is a brilliant book. I really loved it - tension and revelation and the painful maturing of the main character Suki sustain it all the way to the end.

The structure is so powerful that I was only dimly aware of how lovely the prose is. Yet on re-reading sections after the first heady rush I could see how cleanly and strongly written it is. I think it’s one of those books that drags you by the hair through a first desperate reading, and allows you to relax and enjoy the mysteries,...more The Girl Below is a brilliant book. I really loved it - tension and revelation and the painful maturing of the main character Suki sustain it all the way to the end.

The structure is so powerful that I was only dimly aware of how lovely the prose is. Yet on re-reading sections after the first heady rush I could see how cleanly and strongly written it is. I think it’s one of those books that drags you by the hair through a first desperate reading, and allows you to relax and enjoy the mysteries, structure and prose on a second.

There’s nothing saccharine about this book. It’s genuinely terrifying and powerful. So much so that even thinking about it made my skin crawl for a week afterwards.

Read it alone late at night for full impact. It survives interruptions, though you really will resent those requests to do the dishes, or tidy up, or go to work.

The statue Madeleine is a true creature of horror. Through her creation the author transported me back to my own childhood - remembering lying awake all night staring at the shape of my dressing gown hanging on the doorknob – too scared to close my eyes or look away. The horror and psychological elements in the novel are really powerful, and the author’s ability to evoke fear in those passages is stunning. The Notting Hill garden slowly took on mythical proportions; backed by all the elements in the novel of repetition, objects that began as nothing and grew and grew in power, and the frightening slime in the bunker.

The true joy of this novel is that it also reads as a wrenching personal first novel. Suki the main character is heartbreaking in her realness. She’s such a recognizable young woman: kind, lonely, selfish, ambitious, unhappy, generous, modern. I saw myself in her and I think she has universal qualities. The time-slipping horror story is rooted in the reality of a sad young woman who is trying to find a foothold in a hostile world. My heart ached for that girl.

I thought about this book for days after reading it. Highly recommended.(less)

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Mar 22, 2012 Marianne Elliott rated it 5 of 5 stars

I loved The Girl Below. A haunting debut novel in which a young woman slips back in time to solve the mysteries of her childhood, including an incident in an air raid shelter that had the hairs up on the back of my neck.

The deliciously creepy (and yet strangely familiar) mystery at the core of this beautifully crafted novel was so compelling that I abandoned everything else on my To Do list today and stayed in bed until I finished it.

Alongside the gripping psychological mystery, The Girl Below...more

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Aug 15, 2012 Victoria rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: family, lit-fic

Suki Piper narrates this story. The timeline switches back and forth from her present in London in 2003, to her past - in London and her ten years in New Zealand. An only child, Suki certainly is imaginative and spends a lot of time wrapped up in her own thoughts to the exclusion of all else even as an adult. In the present, she falls into the lives of her old neighbors, which brings vividly back memories from her childhood. Suki constantly sinks (in both the present and past sequences) into an...more

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May 12, 2013 Sam rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: fans of literary fiction with a Gothic twist

Recommended to Sam by: ARC from publisher - thank you!

The Girl Below is an intriguing book that picks you up and takes you away from the moment you look at the cover. It’s all absorbing; from the moment I pondered what the girl on the cover could be locked in (or out of) to the point where I’ve finished the book and writing the review. Bianca Zander should be commended on an impressive book that really pulls you in, twisting and turning genres and settings to a gripping conclusion.

The novel’s protagonist is Suki, who returns to London after leaving...more The Girl Below is an intriguing book that picks you up and takes you away from the moment you look at the cover. It’s all absorbing; from the moment I pondered what the girl on the cover could be locked in (or out of) to the point where I’ve finished the book and writing the review. Bianca Zander should be commended on an impressive book that really pulls you in, twisting and turning genres and settings to a gripping conclusion.

The novel’s protagonist is Suki, who returns to London after leaving shortly after her mother’s death. She’s lived in New Zealand (such a rare setting – more please!) for the last ten years, somewhat aimlessly. She thinks that she can return to London and pick up a purposeful life again. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. Her friends have moved on – they’re now serious, with jobs and boyfriends – and Suki falls into drifting again from share flats to people’s couches. She returns to her old flat and visits her old neighbour, Peggy. This causes two things to happen – for Peggy to rekindle her relationship with Peggy’s daughter, Pippa, and her family and to reignite memories of a wild party from her youth. Suki is still terrified of the bomb shelter in the backyard (where she was trapped during this party) and moving in with Peggy fuels her fears. Why is this scene so important to Suki?

Zander makes this novel change from finding oneself to having us question Suki’s mind and motives. Is she all she seems? As Suki’s memories become stronger and scarier, Gothic elements start to shine through until I wasn’t really sure what was real and what was fantasy. The ending pulls it together and whether you agree with the rationale or not, you have to admit that it is powerfully done. Zander creates a sense of atmosphere that is broody, close and almost another character.

Speaking of characters, I found Pippa’s son, Caleb a great character. As a teenager, he’s not scared to get to the point rather bluntly nor push his limits. He’s the antithesis to Suki, who skirts around things and is a powerful force in helping her to confront her memories. Peggy is also wonderfully eccentric with her flat full of costumes and strangely heavy fur coat. Pippa, who we first meet as a devil may care teenager, is wonderfully juxtaposed as the modern day worrying mum – what happened to the carefree girl? Her character shows us the passage of time and how it changes us, whether we like it or not.

A wonderfully atmospheric book debut (so much so that I didn’t want to read the last section at night!)

Thank you to Bloomsbury Sydney for the ARC.

http://samstillreading.wordpress.com
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Jul 28, 2012 Denise rated it 2 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: read-in-2012, drama

I'm not sure exactly how to feel about this book. It didn't really seem like a 'ghost' story to me, but a story about a woman haunted by her past (and when I say haunted I mean haunted). When I first started reading this book I was confused as to where it would go. It felt like there was some big event from Suki's past that she still hadn't gotten over. After reading this I realize it wasn't really just one event from her past that she hadn't gotten over but really most of her past. This book di...more

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Apr 22, 2012 Rosanne rated it 3 of 5 stars

The Girl Below by Bianca Zander was a rather strange story. The chapters travel from the present time in life of Suki to the period of her childhood from 1981 onward. As a child she lived in London with her parents in a rather nice apartment where friends gathered to party. At one of these parties, she witnesses adult things that leave her curious and suspicious. Also part of the landscape in their garden included an old air raid shelter that was below ground and covered by an enormous medal doo...more

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May 16, 2013 Tonya rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: 2013-reads

Brilliant first novel! I can't wait to see more by this author. She carves out a main character for us, that is not your regular character. Sometimes Suki is so pitiful, sulking in her own misery. You can feel it at times dripping off of her, you want her to pull herself up, but she will. Give it time!

Suki has lived in New Zealand for the past 10 years and decides to go back to London, an apartment where her family lived for years in fact. Feeling disconnected from the world, Suki looks for any...more

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Apr 09, 2012 Ellenh rated it 4 of 5 stars

The Girl Below was described as a whirlwind of mystery, intrigue, and self-discovery, and it is every bit of that and very well done. Suki Piper comes alone back to London after leaving for New Zealand 10 years ago following her Mother’s death. Stumbling through her old haunts & friends she finds herself weirdly caught up in her old neighbor, Peggy’s, life. Through this relationship she eerily reconnects to her old life with her parents, going back & forth in time to a couple of incident...more

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May 04, 2012 Coleen rated it 3 of 5 stars

Suki is a young woman essentially trying to find herself. Torn apart by the breakup of her parents' marriage and then her mother's death, she flits around trying to find her correct place in the world. In the meantime, we see flashbacks to some of the more impacting moments of her life. One in particular, an evening of a party at her parents' London flat, is alluded to more frequently. More specifically, an incident in an underground unused air-shelter seems to haunt Suki, and the reader is suck...more

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Jun 05, 2012 Laurel-Rain rated it 4 of 5 stars

Suki Piper has returned to London after a decade long escape to New Zealand. Specifically, she has come back to the old neighborhood in Notting Hill, where her family lived for the first eight years of her life. A place full of memories, some that feel like bits and pieces of surreal images, while others hint at mysterious goings-on that she has struggled for years to piece together and understand.

Soon Suki is once again enmeshed with members of the Wright family: Peggy, the matriarch; Pippa, th...more Suki Piper has returned to London after a decade long escape to New Zealand. Specifically, she has come back to the old neighborhood in Notting Hill, where her family lived for the first eight years of her life. A place full of memories, some that feel like bits and pieces of surreal images, while others hint at mysterious goings-on that she has struggled for years to piece together and understand.

Soon Suki is once again enmeshed with members of the Wright family: Peggy, the matriarch; Pippa, the daughter who was once a teen babysitter for Suki; and Harold, the strange and sometimes condescending son. These former neighbors lived in an upstairs flat above the basement where the Pipers lived, and now Peggy lives there alone.

As Suki floats from place to place, sleeping on friends' couches, she begins to reach out to Pippa, feeling totally disconnected from everyone else, and realizing that friendships she left behind are not so easily resumed. Her old friends seem distant and disinterested.

So when Pippa asks Suki to stay with Peggy, who is in failing health, while her family goes to Greece for vacation, Suki agrees. Where else will she go?

What follows are a series of flashbacks, taking the reader from the present to the past and back again. Suki's first person narrative carries the reader into her early childhood memories, the time in New Zealand, and the strange memories that haunt her about a long-ago time before her father's abandonment of the family.

How does an old air-raid shelter in the backyard figure into Suki's half-formed and surreal memories? Who is "the girl below" and what is her significance in Suki's life? What must Suki do to finally sort out the strange moments and what they mean to her life in the present, and how do they connect to questionable things in the past?

I found myself totally absorbed in Suki's dilemmas, especially her feelings of isolation and disconnect from people and places. Her father's abandonment, followed a few years later by her mother's death, left her feeling unmoored. Rudderless, as if her life had no meaning and she had no significant connections to anyone. Her quest for a feeling of belonging through a series of love affairs and the endless pursuit of the euphoric high of drugs felt appropriate for someone who has not dealt with her issues of abandonment and loss. I was pleased at how Suki was eventually able to finally put the past into its place and form a starting point for a new future. "The Girl Below: A Novel" was a surreal journey into one somewhat narcissistic woman's psyche, and at times, was a bit self-pitying. Four stars.
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Jul 31, 2012 Angela Oliver rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: drama

After the death of her mother, eighteen year old Suki Piper left England to follow her father to New Zealand. Here she existed for the next ten years, drifting through her life with few goals or any real ambition.

Now, in 2003, she has returned to London. But London has forgotten her.

Suki may be twenty-eight, but she still has the lack of maturity that she had exhibited ten years ago. This made her a difficult character for me to feel much empathy towards, as I could not help but watch her drift...more After the death of her mother, eighteen year old Suki Piper left England to follow her father to New Zealand. Here she existed for the next ten years, drifting through her life with few goals or any real ambition.

Now, in 2003, she has returned to London. But London has forgotten her.

Suki may be twenty-eight, but she still has the lack of maturity that she had exhibited ten years ago. This made her a difficult character for me to feel much empathy towards, as I could not help but watch her drift through her London life – overstaying her welcome and distancing herself from people, and wish that she would at least make an effort, instead of just waiting for things to happen.

Of course, this is a major plot point, as there is something in her past that is keeping her emotionally trapped. She has regular flashbacks to an incident that began with a party when she was eight, where she witnessed her babysitter intimately involved with an unknown someone. The memory haunts her, but not as much as the air raid shelter beneath her apartment block. What actually happened down there that had such a profound effect on Suki’s life?

Zander writes very well – her descriptions are vivid, her characters well developed – even if you do somewhat want to slap some of them and tell them to “get on with their life”. Her language is evocative and lyrical, and a wee bit haunting. Despite the regular flashbacks – both in chapters and those that Suki was experiencing in the present, the story flowed well.

Peggy, the aged neighbour, amused me and Suki’s relationship with the other characters, particularly Caleb, made me feel a little uncomfortable at times, as intended. Zander also displays a strong understanding of grief and emotion and writes a compelling tale.

What did disappoint me, however, was the ending. I was all braced for a grand, possibly quite gruesome reveal, something that I thought Zander had been foreshadowing, and when it did not come I could not help but feel slightly cheated. Overall, I did enjoy this book and found it kept me intrigued and I admire the author’s style. It should be interesting to see what she comes up with next.

(Review copy received courtesy of Penguin books, via Booksellers NZ).(less)

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May 19, 2013 Lara rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: fiction, mystery

In The Girl Below we meet Suki, a woman in her late twenties who returns to her home of England after having spent a decade in New Zealand. Upon returning, she does not find the same country that she left; many things have changed, including the people that she had previously called friends. Throughout the novel we watch and she becomes close with the family who had lived in the same apartment building as young Suki did.

There was a bit of a mystery to an otherwise typical story of a woman still...more

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Apr 22, 2013 Heather James rated it 3 of 5 stars

I wanted to like this, and the writing was strong, but I got it because it seemed to have this suspense element to it about a girl trapped below, hence the title. I thought the author did a wonderful job of planting the build up to resolve the suspense element, which even--for me--seemed to trump the fact that the non-suspense element, the main character's life, seemed to go slower at times. Then, after plowing through the whole book to figure out the suspense, I didn't get it! I won't give out...more

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Aug 16, 2012 Chelsea rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: mystery-thriller

This book had the potential to be very interesting. There was a mystery that I could not wait to see how it was resolved. The only problem was that I don't feel like it was resolved. It felt like I was working on a second-hand puzzle - just when I thought I was done, I discovered that there were missing pieces. There was a lot that was left unexplained. Normally, I could get past this. However, I did not even like the main character. She was distant and I never felt I had a clear picture of her....more

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Aug 12, 2012 Trisha rated it 1 of 5 stars

Shelves: supernatural

What the heck was this book about??? The plotline kept jumping back and forth between the character as an adult and when she was growing up, but she also seemed to....time travel ?? to a specific event of her childhood. What was the purpose of revisiting that event? What was the purpose of the hand untying the bow? What was the purpose of....the entire story?!? Just confusing and anti-climactic. I kept waiting and waiting for things to tie together, but I was left with too many unanswered questi...more

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Aug 30, 2012 Cathy rated it 4 of 5 stars

This was a pretty good book. I kind of disliked Suki at first, but I think that's deliberate, on the author's part. Suki comes back to London after ten years in New Zealand. She has no money, few friends and very little idea of how to survive. She left London at age 18, after her mother died of cancer. She reconnects with some old family friends and finds herself haunted by events from her past. But is she really haunted, or is it all in her head?

This book does a good job of keeping you guessing...more

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May 05, 2013 Jacqueline rated it 1 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: burn-worthy

I think Bianca Zander should have titled this book The Girl Below the Poverty Line. Suki Piper is a boring loser with no job, no friends, no boyfriend and no prospects. And that's exactly how the story reads. A hundred pages in I was wondering if the main character was bi-polar and if the story had a point. Two hundred pages in I was skipping pages and found it made no difference to the storyline. The last thirty pages didn't make sense at all.
This book was not what I was expecting. I was hopin...more

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Feb 16, 2013 Lindsay (Little Reader Library) rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: debut, new-zealand, contemporary-fiction

'I had the strangest sensation then that I had somehow left the real world behind, and had gone to a place that didn't exist.'

Suki Piper returns to her childhood home in London after an absence of twenty years, the last ten of which she has spent in New Zealand. Recognising a familiar name on the doorbell to one of the neighbouring flats, she pays a visit to the now very ill lady, Peggy, who still lives there and whom she remembers. As a girl Suki was influenced by Peggy’s children, in particula...more 'I had the strangest sensation then that I had somehow left the real world behind, and had gone to a place that didn't exist.'

Suki Piper returns to her childhood home in London after an absence of twenty years, the last ten of which she has spent in New Zealand. Recognising a familiar name on the doorbell to one of the neighbouring flats, she pays a visit to the now very ill lady, Peggy, who still lives there and whom she remembers. As a girl Suki was influenced by Peggy’s children, in particular her daughter Pippa, and Suki gets back in touch with Pippa to find her struggling with the unruly behaviour of her sixteen-year-old son Caleb.

Suki feels displaced in London, not quite at home anywhere, drifting without a job, her thoughts often returning automatically, and sometimes involuntarily, to the past. She never seems to have settled into her own life, escaping it through drink and drugs, often feeling lonely and still looking for a healthy loving relationship.

It is a rather unsettling read at times, with episodes that are eerie and dreamlike; Suki recalls dark memories and experiences glimpses into her past, to a party over twenty years ago in her parents’ garden, and she is drawn again and again to the haunting recollection of events in an old underground air-raid shelter, and there is also the ornamental figure of a girl which always haunted Suki. She has the feeling that she 'was trespassing across space and time.'

The chapters alternate between her past and present, and between London, New Zealand and Skyros, and we gain a fuller picture of her unsettled life to date.

It’s a very well written debut; Suki is portrayed convincingly as a flawed and troubled narrator and I was absorbed in her world and her troubles. In many ways she isn’t a likeable character yet I had sympathy with her and I felt moved at how alone she was, often seeming very unhappy, unstable and confused, battling with life and being defeated. The novel left me thinking about Suki, wondering what might happen next in her life.

(originally reviewed for we love this book)(less)

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Oct 15, 2012 Jamie rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: first-reads

The slow build of The Girl Below draws you irresistibly into a well-told and easily loping story of magical realism and desperately human truths, despite any hesitation or skepticism with which you might initially approach. With complex characters, be they singular in their associations and occasionally predictable, the story weaves between time, space, and memory, severing then retying the knots that hold them in place and help our world make sense. The book is creepy and funny, dark and uplift...more

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Jul 08, 2012 Jaime (Twisting the Lens) rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: book-tours

Suki Piper is almost thirty-years-old and returns to London, her hometown for the first 18 years of her life. After living in New Zealand for the past ten years, trying to establish a relationship with her father, she returns to a town that she no longer recognizes, and seems to no longer have a place for her. She is immediately drawn to solve mysteries of her childhood after visiting an old neighbor and befriending her old babysitter. This is where it starts to get strange.
Suki has the fragment...more

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Jul 06, 2012 Shellie (Layers of Thought) rated it 3 of 5 stars Recommends it for: vicarious travelers to London, Australia, and Greece

Shelves: spec-fic-fant-paranormal, year-2012-releases, blog-reviews, country-uk-ireland, element-coming-of-age, element-dark-disfunctional, genre-general-fiction-literature, read-in-2012

3.5 stars actually.

Original review posted at Layers of Thought.

A “post-adolescent coming of age” story where the “lost” main character finds herself through a series of events, some paranormal in nature.

About: Told in the first person and mixing the past with the present, the narrator Suki Piper is a young English woman who has just moved home to London from an extended stay in New Zealand. She has come back to her old neighborhood where she lived prior to her mother’s death from cancer. The pro...more 3.5 stars actually.

Original review posted at Layers of Thought.

A “post-adolescent coming of age” story where the “lost” main character finds herself through a series of events, some paranormal in nature.

About: Told in the first person and mixing the past with the present, the narrator Suki Piper is a young English woman who has just moved home to London from an extended stay in New Zealand. She has come back to her old neighborhood where she lived prior to her mother’s death from cancer. The problem is that Suki can’t seem to get her life together. It’s one bad situation after another. Worse is that she is having flashbacks or delusions, which are clouding her ability to make decisions.

Fumbling through her muddled life, she accidentally discovers the answers to the questions that are haunting her - questions that seem to be linked to a night in the past, where her mum, dad and family friends drunkenly explored a defunct air raid shelter after a party. It’s here that something which transcends time occurs.

Thoughts: I enjoyed this layered story with the author’s descriptive writing which is often dryly humorous. There is nothing like the British sense of humor for a good snicker, so expect some giggles. I also liked that it was a vicarious trip to London, New Zealand, Greece and slightly back in time. Set during summer it creates an enjoyable read for the warmer months. Lastly, with its light paranormal element there is an unusual twist to the story, creating it’s sweet ending. All wonderful elements for a story.

I did have several problems. One is that I did need to do some skimming to understand the plot, due to its literary nature - the author goes in depth about the characters and their experiences rather than the plot; not a bad thing for many readers. I also had a hard time relating to the damaged main character. She has an outlook that life probably could not get any worse, which is not the type of character I normally identify with. Suki was a series of car wrecks, understandably because she did have some tough events to digest.

In the end, beyond my niggles, I would say that this is a promising debut from a talented author. I give it a 3.5 star rating. Recommend for Anglophiles looking for a story with a magical twist, a positive ending, and summer settings in Europe.(less)

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Mar 22, 2012 Sarah Laing rated it 5 of 5 stars

The Girl Below by Bianca Zander

Okay, first up a confession. I’ve loved this book since its inception. Since the velvet-gloved hand first reached out of the boiler cupboard and pulled Suki’s dress ribbons undone. And mine too. I was utterly struck by this image, and the matter-of-factness with which it was presented. Magic didn’t belong in other worlds; it belonged in ours.

Bianca was in a writing workshop that I attended (convened by Curtis Sittenfeld), and our excitement was palpable when she re...more The Girl Below by Bianca Zander

Okay, first up a confession. I’ve loved this book since its inception. Since the velvet-gloved hand first reached out of the boiler cupboard and pulled Suki’s dress ribbons undone. And mine too. I was utterly struck by this image, and the matter-of-factness with which it was presented. Magic didn’t belong in other worlds; it belonged in ours.

Bianca was in a writing workshop that I attended (convened by Curtis Sittenfeld), and our excitement was palpable when she read the first page. I was overcome by writer’s jealousy – now why hadn’t I thought to write something like that! That was brilliant. Also, I loved her tone – sharp, funny, vulnerable and hard-nosed. Suki was self-absorbed and falling to pieces, and I was drawn to her character. I willingly tailed her as she peered through keyholes at threesomes; rated boys according to the River Phoenix-ness of their noses; broke into a den of classic vinyl and mopped up the egg yolk yellow vomit of Caleb, her sixteen-year-old charge. ‘You are so in-scene’, Curtis commented at one of Bianca’s passages. And that’s her gift – she can conjure up a world that you can smell, feel, see and hear. This book is visceral, filled with human muck and bricolage. It has a sensual heft.

What I also loved about ‘The Girl Below’ was the depiction of late-seventies, early-eighties Notting Hill. I’d come to this suburb care of Hugh Grant in 1999, and his bookishness didn’t fool me. I knew it was chi-chi, somewhere that only rich people could afford. But Bianca describes a transitional Notting Hill, a place of junk shops and grocery stores, where petty thieves and chorus girls live. She casts an eccentric array of sitting tenants in her old apartment building, which is a character in itself. In particular, she describes Peggy Wright’s family.

Peggy is a wonderful character. She has a sinister statue called Madeleine that terrifies Suki as a child and an adult. She is the definition of the gin-sozzled bohemian, with her fur coats and rusting bird cages. She tyrannises her family as she slips in and out of lucidity. Her daughter, too, is fabulous – from her jerky New Wave dance moves and naughtiness as a teen, to her embracing of Suki when everything falls apart for her. She commandeers Suki into a locus-parentis role for her beautiful, wayward son Caleb.

The coming-of-age realism of this book is thoroughly compelling; what transports it is the time-slipperiness of it all. This is a Tom’s Midnight Garden for grown-ups, a Charlotte Sometimes in which Suki often finds herself displaced. Suki has to mend the wrongs of her childhood, and what better way to do it than to revisit it. To add to the spine-tingling bits, the story roars along – it’s a page-turner and a half. Bianca has spent a lot of time crafting this novel to make it the effortless, thrilling read that it is today.

(less)

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May 24, 2012 Anne rated it 2 of 5 stars

Shelves: read-in-2012

pp 321
I'm on the negative side of this book. It didn't read easily for me, I didn't care for the characters, and the mysteries weren't mysteries they were just oddities. It wasn't just Suki who is flawed, it is all the characters. As a general rule I don't like books that are delivered in a non-linear telling and this one doesn't benefit from the "out-of-order" chapters other than to delay the denouement which wasn't worth the wait. I guess it takes all kinds and this just isn't my kind of book.

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Mar 20, 2013 Nadia Daniel rated it 3 of 5 stars

Shelves: appetizer

Picked it up for the plane ride down to Florida and was hoping for more magical realism and perhaps a lighter story line which is no fault of the author's. Good prose, well written and interesting plot. The lead character was sufficiently vague and unfocused as a person that I found myself groaning out loud every time she made another terrible choice. Was hoping for a more satisfying explanation of the ghostly visitations she had throughout the story.

1 like · like · see review

Apr 08, 2012 Sarah Bainbridge rated it 5 of 5 stars

Ever feel like you could bump into a character from a book and immediately recognise them? That’s Suki Piper. Ever think about a book for days, weeks after you’ve read it? That’s The Girl Below. It stays with you.
An unflinchingly honest yet tender exploration of self-discovery. A story that is suspenseful and intriguing – it kept me thinking beyond the last page.
There’s painful stuff in here. But there is also humour and light. This is an assured debut novel that traverses decades and continents...more

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