Reviews
I suspect if I hadn't been trying to read this novel around a terrible illness relapse, I would have been able to settle into the creepy atmosphere a lot better. But the fact that I recognised that there was one means Little Girls was going it's job as a horror novel! That being said, I think the novel could have been better. Malfi's book is about a woman who goes back to her family home after her father's death. Her marriage is in trouble, she's a bit disconnected from her daughter, and now she's dealing with her estranged father's sudden death. Intertwined with these problems is the largely unspoken of death of her not-so-friend as a child, and the possible haunting of the house. Both of these issues were brought up minimally in the first 3/4 of the book in order to build suspense, but I think the story would have been stronger had some of the revelations come earlier and the characters had to deal with them directly more. Overall, Little Girls was a decent horror novel though, I just wish Malfi had pushed the narrative a bit more.
