Hello beautiful people! Welcome back to another Freida McFadden review. I just can’t seem to get enough of her spine-tingling, mind-twisting, thrillers. The last few books while having enjoyed them just weren’t a top hit for me. I went into Ward D of course expecting good things, but was not expecting at all this mind-boggling world Freida would put us in. As the title may ensure we spend the whole book in a single ward of a hospital, one for people with severe mental issues that lead to violence and other things. Essentially a recipe for disaster, and a book that will be hard to put down. So, let’s get into it!
Main Characters:
- Amy: A young medical student who is doing a night shift on ward D, the lockdown ward known to hold severely unstable and violent mental patients, hoping to just coast through the night is shocked when multiple things from her past trickle their way into the night risking to expose her secrets, when weird things start happening in the ward she may have to face the things she wants to hide from to make it through the night
- Cameron: Amy’s ex-boyfriend and fellow medical student who is also doing a shift on the ward with her
- Jade: Amy’s old best friend from childhood who we go into the past with along with Amy is order to discover what it is that Amy is hiding from
- Dr. Beck: Lead doctor on ward D who tries to lead Cameron and Amy through the night
- Will: A patient in the hospital who Amy takes on for the night to be her patient of focus, starts exposing to Amy weird things that are going on in the ward but due to the reason he is here is hard for Amy to know whether or not she can trust his word
- Damon Sawyer: A patient in ward D who has to be locked in his room at all times due to being extremely dangerous
My Review
Having read the blurb for Ward D by Freida McFadden I was expecting it to be a bit like her book The Inmate just given the book’s setting. While the two books are a touch similar I definitely found Ward D to be the winner out of the two for creepy institutional setting thrillers. Getting into the book I originally wasn’t expecting that to be the outcome. It wasn’t that I felt like the book itself wouldn’t be good but I just wasn’t sure where the twists were going to come in and how exactly they would bring a sense of excitement to the book. I am defiantly eating my words now though because throughout the book I totally had different expectations as to how things were going to go and while there was one twist that I did kind of guess, in the grand scheme I didn’t really get it right at all just a little bit. It’s a fun read with really untrustworthy narrators and characters so it makes it hard to know if what we are reading is the truth or not, and if who’s telling it to us we can trust.
Overall I gave Ward D by Freida McFadden an 8/10 rating. It’s not a very long read so it’s a great thriller to cuddle in with on a weekend and dive into. Once you start getting into it you won’t want to stop. Amy has been working hard in medical school trying to prove herself and make her family proud. Not having yet set on a specialty she sure knows that psychiatry isn’t it for her, so having to do a rotation on ward D is not exciting at all. Ward D is notorious in the hospital for being creepy and dangerous due to the people residing there. Patients staying in ward D are there because they have committed some violent act or crime caused by underlying mental health issues. On the surface, Amy’s fear seems a bit pathetic and like she’s afraid of people with mental illness, but really she’s afraid of what they expose within her own self. Wanting to just get in and out of this 12-hour shift Amy tries to distract herself on the ward. Getting to know Will a risky schizophrenic Amy starts to discover that something much more nefarious than the patients may be going on in the ward. To keep her own secrets in the closet Amy must fight her way out of the ward by finding out what’s going on and why, and what if anything it has to do with her.
I can’t really get too much into the finer details of Ward D because like most Freida McFadden books you expose one thing and it exposes another 10. Getting into the book though I originally didn’t think I would enjoy Amy much as a main character. She seemed really high-strung and a bit full of herself. She’s got very strong emotions and she often almost lets them threaten the things she wants in life and have this power over her. There is this part at the start of the book where she thinks about leaving her shift because her ex-boyfriend Cameron is on the same one as her and I just gave a little eye roll and was like come on girl you are better than this. It just gave this sense that she was unsure of herself. It becomes clear however as the book goes on that this is just a cover for her insecurities and the things she wants to hide from others. As we get more into the book she proves to be the perfect main character to take us on this journey.
Overall Ward D is a great thriller to check out It is set in this seemingly boring setting of a hospital ward and places us into this hell that Amy may never get out of. I really enjoyed the setting and it felt like reading a script almost for a classic early 2000s psychological thriller movie where we are in the same setting for most of the film, which just adds to the intenseness of what the characters go through. I would say that I am a simple gal when it comes to what I like. I enjoy books that have seemingly simple settings and casts only to be much more complicated under the surface, and Ward D by Freida McFadden is definitely one of them.
Has anyone else checked out Ward D by Freida McFadden or any of her other books? What did you think?
*** Don’t go any further if you don’t want to read any spoilers ***
Something that gets exposed early on in the book is that the past perspectives from Amy when she is with her best friend Jade are very important because Amy is not alone on ward D during her shift. Jade is there as a patient. It’s just been a handful of years since the two last talked, and it seems like Amy may have had something to do with her being there.
In the past perspectives, we start to get this feeling that it’s not actually Jade who’s suffering from mental illness but it is Amy. I started to think that maybe did something because of her mental health to land Jade here, I guess I was totally wrong. Throughout the night in Ward D Amy starts seeing things that aren’t really there. The issues? They are actually there she’s just being led to believe she is crazy, just like when she and Jade were younger.
I am skipping over a lot but when Cameron goes missing on the ward Amy starts to realize that something serious is going on. Eventually, she realizes that there is only one room on the ward she hasn’t had access to and that’s Damon Sawyers. When more patients start to go missing it’s becoming clear that someone is attacking them but the question is who and why. Will tries to warn Amy but because of the mental illness she thinks he has that he doesn’t actually have she struggles to trust him. Once Amy is finally able to get into Damon Sawyer’s room she finds a sea of bodies. She eventually discovers as well that Dr. Beck is not supposed to be a handsome young man but an old well-seasoned doctor. Oh yeah and when she goes into Damon Sawyers’s room guess who isn’t in there? Damon Sawyer.
Once things started to pick up in the book I did guess that it was some way for Jade to get revenge on Amy but I wasn’t sure why. It turns out that Amy did have something to do with Jade ending up here. Jade attacked one of their teachers after the two stole a test, cheated, and were caught. Amy told on her leading her to be examined psychiatrically and determined unstable, leading Jade to have a long life in and out of institutions. When she saw that Amy was going to be on the ward she and her boyfriend created a plan to try and escape Ward D hopefully leaving Amy to take the blame at the end. Damon was pretending to be Dr. Beck the whole time, another patient a friend of theirs one of the nurses. The real ones were all dead in Damon’s room. Since Amy had never met anyone on the ward before she didn’t know any better. Amy ends up foiling their plan with the help of Will and another patient and can get away. Jade and Damon are destined to stay in facilities for the rest of their lives.
I felt like I didn’t really explain all the twists in a way that gives it justice but I promise that the way it’s played out is much more enjoyable than how I explained it. It’s really fun to read and it’s hard to see what’s coming next.
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.
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