The book is really more of a study in family and communal neighborhood dynamics than it is a mystery novel or suspense thriller. It focuses on the relationships of adolescent children, especially the girls, with the one boy in the group apparently clueless. 'Boys are so dumb and girls are so mean' seems to be the moral of the story. So if you approach it from that perspective, you may accept it, but there's still no reason for leaving so much hanging at the end. Just because the young victim doesn't want anyone to know what happened doesn't mean the reader shouldn't know. Meanwhile, I'm getting tired of anticlimactic endings. Do you think Adele does the right thing by keeping quiet after she discovers what happened to Grace? What would you have done in her position?

Adele has a very lenient, alternative parenting style, homeschooling and preferring to let her children make their own choices, whatever they are. She repeatedly suggests that she feels judged by others for her lifestyle. How did you feel about how she is raising her children? Were there points in the book you felt supportive or critical of her maternal choices? And what is it with seat mates on flights who don’t get the hint when you have your nose in a book? Last year it happened when I was reading The Seven Good Years. Yesterday, it happened as I was reading The Girls in the Garden. Some drunken idiot sitting next to me kept asking what I was reading, whether it was any good, and sorry for bothering you, it won’t happen again... I used to read too but I don’t have time anymore, how’s that book by the way …Why do you think Lisa Jewell wrote primarily from Pip, Clare, and Adele’s perspectives? What do these narrators have in common? What is unique about their different standpoints, and how does this affect the story? The foot is attached to a person. Pip passes the beam from her mobile phone across the figure: a girl, half-undressed. Shorts yanked down to her thighs, floral camisole top lifted above her small naked breasts. Her hair is spread about her. Her face is a bloodied mass. The park and specifically its residents were quite odd. The main characters were teenagers who could run free and do whatever they wanted in their park gardens.

We all loved the enchanting communal garden that appears to be the perfect oasis and a parent’s dream place to let their kids play and always have friends around, however we soon learn of the danger lurking in the garden. Two mysteries are among the bushes and thorns that had us suspecting almost everyone and Jaline even suspected a total bystander. We came up with a few different scenarios and our thriller imaginations were running all over the place. In the end we were very happy we were wrong about many. What did I think?: I really enjoyed this book. It wasn't the heart-racing tale that I had possibly hoped, but it wasn't disappointing either. I see this one really being popular with many readers and I'm glad I was able to get my hands on it and share it with others early on. Well, I am going to be in the minority here. I had heard a lot of good things about this book. I anxiously awaited my copy to be available at the library. I waited and waited and waited. Then finally it was ready. The foot is attached to a person. Pip passes the beam from her mobile phone across the figure: a girl, half undressed. Shorts yanked down to her thighs, floral camisole top lifted above small naked breasts. Her hair is spread about her. Her face is a bloodied mass. Jewell begins her story with a scene in which 12-year-old Pip Wild finds her sister, Grace, bleeding and unconscious in Virginia Park, a communal park behind their house.

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THE GIRL IN THE GARDEN by LISA JEWELL is an engrossing, intriguing, steady-paced, and a suspenseful mystery with lots of twists and turns along the way that kept us all reading and guessing right to the very end. We were pretty much suspicious of every character! Meanwhile, Pip began making an effort to get to know her new surroundings. She talked to Rhea and learned about Phoebe, a girl who died of an apparent drug overdose in the park. Rhea told Pip that Gordon, Leo’s father, was a pedophile. Rhea hoped that Leo, the father of the Howes sisters was not a pedophile as well. Rhea’s suggestion made Pip consider the way Leo treated Tyler as well as the way Grace seemed unusually attracted to him and wondered if perhaps he was following in his father’s footsteps. Adele became suspicious of her husband while proofreading Rhea’s memoirs. Rhea mentioned that Leo had dated Cece, a girl who was 13 years old while Leo was 18. So, overall, I enjoyed the book, although it wasn’t exactly what I was expecting, and think fans of psychological suspense will like this one too.

Do you think Clare made the right decision in keeping Pip and Grace’s father’s release from the hospital a secret? Why or why not?THE AUTHOR: Lisa was born in London in 1968. Her mother was a secretary and her father was a textile agent and she was brought up in the northernmost reaches of London with her two younger sisters. She was educated at a Catholic girls’ Grammar school in Finchley. After leaving school at sixteen she spent two years at Barnet College doing an arts foundation course and then two years at Epsom School of Art & Design studying Fashion Illustration and Communication. From the very beginning we know something terrible has happened, which lends an ominous air to all that follows. After a family disaster Clare and her two daughters move into this gorgeous place that because of its communal space, acres that are shared by all the houses surrounding it, seem like a good place to call home. Clare’s feeling of safety was false because she did not have any idea of the way the introduction of her daughters into the territory of the group of teens who had grown up in the park would change the hierarchy and status of that situation. Adele, who had lived near the park all of her married life sensed the changes in the group but thought that it was the result of the children growing older and changing loyalties. When Adele realized that Dylan, who had been friends with Tyler since they were babies, appeared to be romantically involved with Grace, she believed perhaps jealousy was at the center of the feelings of unease among the group of friends. Lisa Jewell's characters are so real that I finish every book half-expecting to bump into one of them. Modern, complex, intuitive, she just goes from strength to strength." - Jojo Moyes, author of After You One of People’s, Glamour’s, and BuzzFeed’s Best Reads of Summer, from the New York Times bestselling author of Then She Was Gone