Such a Clever Girl by Darby Kane [Book Review]

A missing family, a mansion turned local legend, and one of the vanished daughters strolling back into town fifteen years later. Such a Clever Girl has a genuinely creepy hook; it takes way too long to pay off.

Rating: 2.75 out of 5 stars

A family disappears, their enormous house turns into local ghost-story material, and then one of the missing daughters casually strolls back into town fifteen years later.

Obviously, I had questions.

Darby Kane’s Such a Clever Girl has exactly the kind of setup that usually gets me. There’s an abandoned mansion, a mysterious family disappearance, a small town that has spent years turning rumor into fact, and several women who clearly know much more than they are willing to admit.

For a while, that was enough to keep me hooked.

Unfortunately, the book spends a little too much time circling the mystery before finally answering it.

What Happened to the Tanner Family?

Fifteen years ago, the Tanner family disappeared without a trace.

They left behind half-eaten meals, a bloodstain near the door, and plenty of questions. Across town, their family business was burning.

Then, nothing.

Their home has remained frozen in time ever since, slowly becoming the kind of place teenagers dare each other to approach and adults pretend they don’t still think about.

And then Aubrey Tanner comes back.

Now thirty, Aubrey returns to town without offering much explanation for where she’s been, why she’s returned, or what she knows about the night her family vanished.

Which, naturally, sends everyone straight back into detective mode.

Because if Aubrey survived, what happened to everybody else?

And perhaps more importantly, who in town already knows the answer?

Everybody Knows Something

The story rotates among four women: Aubrey, Marni, Hanna, and Stella.

Each has a different connection to the Tanner family. Each is keeping secrets. And each seems determined to reveal information at the exact slowest possible pace.

Trust is apparently not available in Sleepy Hollow.

I actually liked how Kane allows these women to be messy. They’re secretive, protective, and occasionally infuriating, the kind of characters that make me want to gently grab them by the shoulders and ask what exactly the plan was.

None of them fits comfortably into the role of innocent victim or obvious villain.

That becomes one of the book’s more interesting parts.

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Protecting the Family Can Cover a Lot of Ground

There’s some smart material here about the things people excuse in the name of protecting their families.

Secrets become sacrifices, and bad decisions get repackaged as necessary ones.

And women, especially mothers, are expected to absorb all kinds of damage while still somehow keeping everything together and making it look respectable from the outside.

Kane plays with those expectations in interesting ways.

Several characters have spent years carrying secrets because they believed telling the truth would destroy someone they loved. Eventually, though, the book starts asking a much less comfortable question.

Who are you actually protecting?

Because sometimes “protecting the family” means protecting the family’s image. Or protecting someone from consequences. Or protecting yourself from admitting what you already know.

That part worked for me.

I Just Wanted It to Move Faster

The mystery itself has plenty going for it.

The Tanner disappearance has a genuinely creepy small-town-legend quality, and I liked how the past never really feels like a cold case. It feels more like everyone involved is one inconvenient question away from completely falling apart.

But the book takes a while to get there.

The four rotating perspectives should theoretically increase the tension, because everyone knows something different. Instead, they occasionally slow things down.

There were stretches where it felt like the story was walking around the Tanner mansion, peering through different windows, while I stood outside thinking, “Great. Can we please go inside now?”

A few revelations also felt more delayed than surprising.

I was interested in the answers. I just wanted the book to stop teasing them and actually give them to me.

Victims, Villains, and Everything In Between

The strongest idea in Such a Clever Girl is probably its refusal to make anyone particularly easy to categorize.

People who have been hurt can still hurt others, and the person everyone’s decided is the villain is often just the easiest to blame.

I appreciated that Kane lets the characters live in that uncomfortable space.

Nobody gets to be entirely good or entirely terrible. Everybody has a version of the story that makes their choices seem reasonable.

At times, that ambiguity is far more interesting than the mystery itself.

So, Would I Recommend Such a Clever Girl?

Maybe.

Such a Clever Girl has a great premise, an eerie central mystery, and some genuinely interesting ideas about family loyalty, motherhood, reputation, and the stories people tell themselves to justify keeping secrets.

I also liked that its women are allowed to be complicated and occasionally deeply frustrating.

But the pacing dragged for me; the rotating perspectives sometimes diluted the tension, and I wanted the revelations to land with a little more force after all that buildup.

If the premise sounds exactly like your kind of mystery, I’d say look it up and decide for yourself.

Just know that getting to the truth takes a lot of time spent standing outside that creepy house first.

Thank you to NetGalley and William Morrow for an advanced reader’s copy. All opinions expressed in this review are my own.

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