Perfect by V.J. Chambers

I'm not entirely sure what I was expecting from this book, but it certainly took me down a very different route than one anticipated.  It is best described as a mix between The Stepford Wives (no leaps of association required here it is mentioned multiple times in the text), the Going Clear documentary and any Gothic horror movie you ever saw.  Whatever the mix is, I found this to be a hugely entertaining novel by an author I had never read before and one that I will be purchasing more from based on this one novel.

Sidney is a great character, a nicely balanced and nuanced everywoman who just happens to write and self-publish paranormal romances.  This is a lucrative business but since her second divorce, her eldest daughter moving away to college and moving to Lassiters Cove she now seems to be suffering from Writers Block.  The friction with her ex-husband and the shared custody of her 6 year old daughter isn't helping matters so she decides to use the free massage voucher in her neighbourhood welcome pack.  This is where we get to meet two of the other main players in this story - the Lotus Centre and Leo Giles.

From this jumping off point the author has left themselves plenty of scope to talk about body positivity, societal pressures to confirm, herd mentality and the wonder of a really good horror movie.  The pacing is fast but deftly handled so it never feels rushed but you do move from event to event quite rapidly and there is more going on than the Stepford-esque perfection of The Regimen.  There is even time for a little romance to be sprinkled here and there in to the mix.

My biggest problem was the unsatisfactory nature of the ending to the tale, not quite resolved but not left wide enough open to really return.  There were also, to my mind, some timeline issues where the sequence of events appeared to get a bit jumbled up.  Ultimately this didn't matter as this is a jolly good caper and was a quite inventive take on modern life through film references.  There is also some decent humour sprinkled amongst the jump scares and the panic.

Wonderful story telling that completely drew me in and made this book disturbingly difficult to put down.