Don’t Let Her Stay by Nicola Sanders

Hello beautiful people! Welcome to a new review! For this review I get into a spine-chilling thriller Don’t Let Her Stay by Nicola Sanders, which follows a story of a woman being mentally tortured within the walls of her own home. Filled with suspicious characters, and an unreliable main perspective it’s a book that gets you wondering as you get through it.

Main Characters:

• Joanne: Wife to Richard and mother to Evie their baby daughter, has her seemingly perfect world destructed when Richard’s daughter from his previous marriage Chloe comes to stay with them throwing the house into chaos, the biggest issue is that Joanne is the only one seeing it and no one will believe her
• Richard: Joanne’s husband who works at a lucrative company to pay for the lavish life of his family, is very blind when it comes to his 20-year-old daughter Chloe and struggles to see her flaws even when it affects others that he loves
• Chloe: She is a huge brat but does have a tough background having lost her mother at a young age and feeling abandoned by her father, she takes her anger out on her new stepmom who she seems hell-bent on making miserable despite technically being an adult

My Review

Don’t Let Her Stay by Nicola Sanders follows what seems to be the perfect couple, with their perfect daughter, in their ideal home, and how quickly that idea of perfection can come tumbling down. I found Don’t Let Her Stay to be enjoyable but I personally enjoyed the second half better than the first. I’ll be honest I wasn’t fully certain I was going to make it through the first half, I am glad I did because it’s definitely worth it but there are some things about that first half that are just difficult. I also feel that my dislike with the first half was kind of personal in some ways so I feel like a lot of other people could feel differently to me.

I battled with what to rate Don’t Let Her Stay and ultimately landed on a 7/10 since I felt like the second half of the book really saved it.

Don’t Let Her Stay by Nicola Sanders is a story told through the perspective of Joanne a seemingly average stay-at-home mom who maybe has a bit too much free time on her hands. Joanne and her husband Richard have a picturesque life together, Richard successful in his career, can buy himself and his family a gorgeous home in the middle of the country. Joanne can’t imagine how things could get any better until they start to get much worse. Richard’s 20-year-old daughter Chloe has reached out expressing to want to come stay with the family so she can get to know her baby sister. Chloe and her father have had a difficult past coming to a startling halt when Richard married Joanne causing Chloe to cut contact with him. Oddly, she wants to come and see them, and it soon becomes clear to Joanne why that is. She didn’t come to get to know her baby sister, she came to destroy Joanne’s life. Completely unaware of the spell Richard was under when it came to his daughter Joanne invites someone into her home with much more control and mental manipulation skills than she is comfortable with.

The aspect that I struggled with in the first half of the book is that is focused a lot on Richard and Chloe essentially gaslighting and just mentally torturing Joanne. I understand that yes this is a fiction book that isn’t real, but I was horrified at what Joanne was willing to put up with the whole book. An example is that Chloe calls Joanne Joanna throughout the whole book. Joanne tries to correct her but she just does it over and over again and Richard doesn’t say a single thing about it. I know that may seem petty but it just irked me so much. I think it was just the blatant disrespect that was being shown to Joanne and then everyone would turn around and make it her fault. There is this element to Joanne’s back story where her mother suffered from post-partum psychosis and Joanne constantly questions herself if that’s what’s going on with her. I mean to be blunt it was just a bit of an eye roll to me. I mean I get that something needed to explain why Joanne would be willing to put up with this abuse in her own home but it just made me groan because while obviously mental illness can be genetic it’s also something that can be managed. It just made it seem like that there could be this undercurrent throughout the whole book in which Joanne could really be mentally ill the whole time making things up but it just wasn’t a favourite way to explain away all the worries she was having about Chloe.

As I said through getting into the second half these things mellow out and it becomes a bit more of a thriller rather than a ‘what can we do to Joanne to piss the reader off’ type of book. The gaslighting continues as well but Joanne just becomes a bit more confident in trusting herself which also made everything a bit more enjoyable for me as well. I just wanted her to get that backbone in. The chaos in this second half ensues though and some new twists are thrown in that I didn’t see coming at all. There were a few I did given how some things go in the first half but in terms of the big twists I didn’t see them coming and it was enjoyable to see how it spun out.

While I sympathised with Chloe and what she went through in her life it was not enough of an explanation for how insufferable she is throughout this book. I mean it’s just rank and I questioned what the hell her end game was. I mean even if Joanne left Richard she would take Evie with her so it’s not like Chloe could have Richard and the baby. It was hard to tell throughout the book what exactly she wanted more. Both with Richard and Evie, she adores them in some parts and hates them in others so it was hard to tell what her exact purpose was for disturbing their lives in the way she did. I mean I thought it was kind of funny that all the mental illness stuff gets pinned on Joanne when it’s very clearly Chloe who is the unstable one. I also found myself frustrated with Richard. He only defended Joanne in private and I just got the sense that this very manly man persona he put on was all a lie to just try to appease everyone and stay out of conflict.

Overall an interesting read, and like I said if you are willing to put up with some of the insanity from the first half it is worth it to get to the second. It’s definitely a spine-chilling book thinking about someone being manipulated in this way in their own home and you just want to keep reading to see if Joanne will ever get out of this nightmare, and how.

Have you read Don’t Let Her Stay by Nicola Sanders before? What did you think? Did you enjoy all sections of the book?

*** Don’t go any further if you don’t want to read any spoilers ***

The question we are all asking is why is Chloe such an ass to Joanne, and why Richard ignores his daughter’s behaviour. Well, it turns out it’s because he’s scared of her, and not for the reasons we would all think.

Richard is scared of Chloe because she can expose the type of person he is, or that’s what she makes it seem. In the second half, Chloe exposes that she was rude to Joanne in an attempt to get her to take Evie and leave Richard, but it is because she wants to protect them from him. Chloe’s mother died in odd circumstances, and her baby sister from just random infant death. Chloe spins a story for Joanne in which Richard killed her sister and mother for financial gain and was going to do it again to Joanne and Evie. Chloe convinces her this is true and eventually Richard catches on and it seems like he tries to attack them… emphasis on the seems. Turns out he just wanted Chloe because he knew what she was capable of and knew she may try to hurt Joanne and Chloe.

In a very not as exciting description of what happened, Richard gets thrown under the bus for everything. It’s not until sometime later that Joanne meets Chloe’s maternal grandmother and realizes that the crazy things Richard said about Chloe line up with her story as well. So, Joanne realizes that once again she is a prisoner in her own home.

It was a twisty ending with this back-and-forth uncertainty of whether it was Richard who was the evil one or Chloe and I loved that it left off with a bit of a cliffhanger with Joanne coming to the realization she was wrong about Richard but uncertain about what to do next. It further left the question though of what the hell Chloe’s goal was. I mean her Dad is dead and she has a stepmother and her sister but is the end goal to have Evie all to herself? It was really hard to tell but it defiantly left you wondering at the end.

I hope you enjoyed this review! Feel free to follow me on my socials @baddiebookreviews to be kept up to date for when I release a new review!