Hi friends and welcome to the first installment of Fatigato’s Fiction Fix, previously known as Cat’s Cozy Corner. As an avid reader, I’m always trying to broaden my lenses, reading across genres from fantasy and romance, to science fiction or thrillers, to find my next favorite read. I’m all for finding that comfort read, the one book that will make you cry your heart out, or one that’ll make you rethink and question the narrator themselves. Which is why, for this first installment, I found it fitting to start with the thriller by Jeneva Rose, Home Is Where The Bodies Are. This installment will include spoilers for the book.
Jeneva Rose is a New York bestselling author, and is mainly known for her works in the suspense and thriller genre. Most famously, she’s known for her bestselling novel, The Perfect Marriage, which was originally published in 2020 and currently in the works for being adapted into film. From reading a large variety of her work with the exception of her novels that were under her original publishing name, J.R. Adler, it’s clear that this author has a knack for keeping readers on their toes with an abundance of twists and turns that leave you wondering how the killer was right in front of you the whole time.
In Home Is Where The Bodies Are, this idea of suspense left me questioning everything until the very last page. The story itself follows the perspectives of three siblings, Beth, Nicole, and Michael, who after their late mother, Laura, passes, the three discover a deadly secret from 1999 in their small town of Allens Grove, Wisconsin. Fitting to that theme of secrets, I found it to be an incredible cover design choice for this book because it displayed a bloody VHS tape. This showed how while the mother, Laura, loved creating home videos (which many families did then), one of these tapes showed the dark past of what happened to a young girl who went missing years ago and how Laura and her husband found the bloodied body and decided to hide it till their own deaths.
The book represented how relationships can be strained with envy as each of the characters faced their own struggles throughout the story. This included Nicole being a recovering addict trying not to relapse, Beth isolating herself to stay with her mother instead of abandoning the small town, and Michael who seemed to get everything his sisters dreamed of, but not being welcomed to come home anymore. Rose does an astonishing job at pinning the siblings against one another even as they try to solve the murder that their parents buried away, but it also raised the question of how far one would go to hide the truth a little longer.
Overall it was a great read that I couldn’t seem to put down for a second. I’ve tried with every one of her thrillers to guess how the book will end and every time I’m left in awe at how she is able to deceive her readers and never give up the endings. It displays the depth of a parent’s love for their children, and just how far they would go to protect them… even if it means covering up a murder for them. In the end, I love how it also switches slightly to become meta-fiction, where the sister, Nicole, becomes an author writing about the history of her family and the murders, even using the lines, “The best stories come from those that are flawed, broken, really. Those who have endured trials and tribulations. Those who have faced the world and come out on the bottom. Only they can tell stories worth listening to, for they have had more than one beginning, more than one middle they’ve dragged themselves through, and more than one ending… and despite it all, their story continues” (pg. 246) which embodies perfectly what the siblings had gone through, and specifically herself where she overcame her addiction to have a better life.
If you’re looking for a book full of suspense and secrets that will leave you wondering who you can really trust, this is the book for you, I know it was definitely the one for me. While that’s all I have to say about this book for now, I’m excited to see what the next one has in store.
Catherine Fatigato – Prose Editor, Layout Editor & Blogger: Catherine is a Senior at Lewis University majoring in English with a concentration in writing. She aspires to have a career within the publishing field once she completes her Bachelors degree. When she’s not in class she can be found reading one of the many books on her to-be-read list; with some of her favorite authors including, Gayle Forman, Rebecca Ross, and Jeneva Rose.