The Birdcage by Eve Chase

 

The Birdcage by Eve Chase.

Published 28th April 2022 by Penguin Michael Joseph.

From the cover of the book:

Lauren, Kat and Flora are half-sisters who share a famous artist father - and a terrible secret.

After years of drifting apart, they are unexpectedly summoned to Rock Point, the cliff house where they once sat for their father's most celebrated painting, Girls and Birdcage.

Rock Point is a beautiful, windswept place, thick with secrets and electrically charged with the catastrophic events of a summer twenty years before. The day of the total solar eclipse.

It's the first time they've dared return.

When the sisters arrive, it is clear that someone is determined not to let the past lie. Someone who is watching their every move. Who remembers the girls in the painting, and what they did... 

Set on the rugged Cornish coast, The Birdcage is a twisty, spellbinding novel with unforgettable characters who must piece together their family's darkest secrets.

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Twenty years have passed since half-sisters Lauren, Kat and Flora have set foot in Rock Point, the rambling cliff-top Cornish house where they spent childhood summers with their famous artist father Charlie. Twenty years since the summer they sat for Charlie while he painted his most celebrated work, Girls and Birdcage. Twenty years since the emotionally fraught summer of the total solar eclipse, when tragedy struck and changed their lives forever. The sisters have drifted apart in the years that followed, and have never confronted what happened that summer, but Charlie has now summoned them with news of an impending announcement, and somehow the time seems right to revisit Rock Point and the secrets it holds.

As soon as they arrive at Rock Point, in a freezing January far removed from the heady summer days of their childhood memories, it's clear that someone is determined to rake up the past. There is a feeling that they are being watched and someone is leaving threatening messages warning them to leave and never return. But Rock Point has them in its grip and even though the house has fallen into disrepair, their memories start to resurface. The time has come to address what happened all those years ago and to set free the secrets that haunt them...

This is a book that grips you from the first page and holds you fast through the tense and twisty goings on within its pages, until all the secrets of this dysfunctional family come spilling out. Told in a brilliantly engaging format which flips between the narrative of the three sisters from the time of their return to Rock Point in 2019, and Lauren's account of that fateful summer of the eclipse in 1999, The Birdcage is a quintessential example of a story about how family secrets that are never discussed can overshadow people's lives.

Eve Chase uses the cliff-top location of Rock Point to perfection, contrasting the settings of heady childhood summers in an idyllic location, with the starkness of a frozen January in the present day, and uses them to evoke just the right kind of atmosphere for each part of this mystery. The way Chase conjures up the hazy summer of 1999 elicits the feel that events are building up to a tragic boiling point as the temperature rises, with whispers of half-heard conversations carried on an ear-caressing breeze, and flashes of sun-blinded images, and she weaves in the tension of the impending eclipse to ratchet up the otherworldliness of it all beautifully - almost as if the presence of the three sisters is invoking a witchy enchantment. The present day reunion is completely at odds with this atmosphere - the house is crumbling, the weather is bitter and stormy, and there is a brittle frostiness in the air that promises to be shattered as a family tormented by buried memories, grief and current pressing troubles is forced back together in the house where their lives were derailed. Superb!

Against the dissonance of such disparate settings in the two timelines, Chase knows how to write about tricky family dynamics with accomplished flair - especially in terms of the uncomfortable childhood yearning to fit in and be accepted; and how jealousy, emotional distance, and the barriers of the unspoken get in the way. There is so much here about the disparity between the faces we show to the world and the turmoil that goes on under the surface, and Chase uses this as a modern fable to explore how we can move on if only we are brave enough to bring the barriers crashing down. I also loved how the relationship between the sisters grows over the course of the story, as they finally understand what binds them together is more than just sharing the same father, and the way Chase uses the painting Girls and Birdcage as a marred representation of how they were all frozen in time.

But that is not all, because at its heart this is also the very best kind of mystery story. Chase builds suspense with a delicious slow-burn until almost all the little pieces of the puzzle come together with a shocking climax that brings all the beautiful elements of setting, weather, and human frailty together to reveal the truth we have been grasping for. She then proceeds to tie up every loose thread, wrapping everything up in a very satisfying bow. 

I have to add that Chase uses the motifs of birds, birdcages, artistic technique and paintings very cleverly to enhance the myriad of themes, intertwining them with so many aspects of the story. I particularly enjoyed how Bertha the African Grey parrot, and Charlie's sketches, are used as story devices.

As you can probably tell, I enjoyed this story enormously, unable to look away from the lives of this messed up family for a second. I think it's true to say that they are a pretty unlikeable bunch at the outset, but my goodness they work their way under your skin and I shed many tears at the end of my adventure with them. What a cracking read!

The Birdcage is available to buy now in hardcover, ebook and audio formats.

Thank you to Penguin Michael Joseph for sending me a copy of this book in return for an honest review, and for inviting me to be part of this blog tour.

About the author:

Eve Chase writes rich suspenseful novels about families - dysfunctional, passionate - and the sort of explosive secrets that can rip them apart. She writes the stories that she'd love to read. Mysteries. Page-turners. Worlds you can lose yourself in. Reading time is so precious: She tries to make her books worthy of that sweet spot.

Her office is a garden studio/shed. There are roses outside. She lives in Oxford with her three children, husband, and a ridiculously hairy golden retriever, Harry.