Annie Lewis just wanted her Senior year to be normal but her parents had to go and get divorced. Now she's spending her summer preparing herself for a new school in a new neighborhood where she doesn't know anyone. Worse? The house that will now be known as "her mother's house" is a duplex. Who knew they even made those anymore?
When noises begin coming from the other side of the duplex, Annie gets dragged into what could turn out to be the worst summer of her life. Now Annie must unlock the mystery behind the noises before her time runs out.
Annie Lewis just wanted her Senior year to be normal but her parents had to go and get divorced. Now she's spending her summer preparing herself for a new school in a new neighborhood where she doesn't know anyone. Worse? The house that will now be known as "her mother's house" is a duplex. Who knew they even made those anymore?
When noises begin coming from the other side of the duplex, Annie gets dragged into what could turn out to be the worst summer of her life. Now Annie must unlock the mystery behind the noises before her time runs out.
My mother is taking me away from everything I have ever known. It’s hard not to be mad about that. This whole divorced parents thing raises a lot of questions for me about what love really is and how you’re supposed to know when you’ve found it. Is it possible to be wrong when you think you’re in love? Here’s the most important question: if divorce is so painful and expensive, yet seems to be so common these days, why do people even get married?
I remember reading a book once with a girl whose parents got divorced. The book wasn’t really about that. Honestly, I don’t remember what it was about. I just remember the girl lamenting having two of everything, including houses. At the time, I was probably ten, I remember thinking that was a stupid thing to complain about. I even thought it would be so cool to have two of everything.
Now, driving Mom’s new car to Mom’s new house with the car full of “only the essentials because we can buy everything else” I totally get what she was upset about. Two of everything isn’t going to be cooler. It’s going to suck. Completely.
Mom turns the little Focus onto a small street. “See, isn’t this cute?” She’s being overly chipper. I think part of me knows that’s because she wants me to love this idea. But how can I love it? The place where I grew up is forevermore going to be known as “the old house”. Someone else is going to live there. My friends are going to drive by and say “remember when Annie used to live here?” Actually, it’ll get worse than that, because they’ll stop driving by. They’ll forget who I ever was.
“Annie, isn’t this cute?” Mom repeats.
“It’s fine.” The street looks like a regular street. Really, Avondale seems to be just like Surprise. The landscaping is all low water, desert-style stuff. The main streets have lights every half mile and cars are driving way too fast. The side streets have more stop signs than are actually necessary and are too narrow for two cars to drive side-by-side if anyone is parked on the side of the street. This particular street we’re on now looks like all the rest. Nothing is striking about it at all. Except that Mom’s slowing down, which means we’re here.
She takes a right and pulls off the road into a driveway that is shaped like a U. I didn’t know houses in Arizona actually had those. “What the hell?” I whisper. But the radio is off because it helps Mom focus or some garbage and we’re alone in the car. So, I’m guessing that sigh she just let out is her way of saying she heard me and I should watch my language.
The house is one-story, like most of the other ones around here, and absurdly long. Our house—the old house—was basically square from the outside. It was my favorite thing about it. This one is a defined rectangle and we’re facing the long end. There also appear to be two doors, one on either end of the big U driveway. “Which door is the front door?” I ask, finally looking at Mom instead of at the house.
She puts the car in park, turns off the engine, and opens her door. “They’re both front doors, technically.” She stands up from the car and stretches like the thirty-minute drive through morning traffic we just took was a cross-country jaunt. I get the distinct impression there is something she is not telling me.
I push open my door and stand up as she’s coming around the trunk of the car. “Should we go in and look around before we bring in our stuff?” she asks.
“Mom, is something wrong with this house?”
“Wrong?” She squints at me. “Why would you ask that? No, it’s perfectly fine. Come see.” She practically jogs across the small landscaping rocks to the front door on the left and uses the key she picked up this morning to open the single lock. I wonder, for a second, how long it will be before she has a second lock put on this door, for safety reasons. The old house had two.
She pushes the door open and disappears into the darkness of the house. There’s no point in standing out here, honestly, so I follow her inside. The living room, which is what I assume we walk into, is a big square. It looks like a fairly good size, empty like this. There’s a plank-style floor, but judging by the sound my feet are making I’m thinking it’s not real wood. Mom points upward. “Nice high ceilings, right?” I follow the point of her finger. Honestly, it’s not huge. But I guess it’s taller than the old house. I shrug.
She heads toward the back of the house, along the wall of the living room on the right. There’s a closet thing that makes a section of the living room look a little more narrow. “This is a coat closet,” Mom says. She spins in the area she’s standing in. “This is the dining room.” There’s nothing to separate this dining room from the living room at all. It looks like one continuous room. No little divider, no light over where our table would go, nothing. I blink slowly at her, not sure what exactly I’m supposed to say here.
Mom ignores me and keeps moving through the large doorway in the wall behind her, straight into the kitchen. There’s a stainless steel refrigerator up against the wall on the right. There’s a stove on the left. On the back wall of the house, there’s a double sink under a window looking out onto what appears to be a small patio and a large desert landscaped yard. There's also a door, presumably leading to the same backyard area. I walk around the perimeter of the small kitchen and stop when I’m facing Mom, who is still standing in the kitchen doorway. “Wait a second,” I hold up a hand to stop her from spinning away from this question. “We just walked the entire length of this house up the middle. How do you get to the other half of the house?” I flick my hand toward the side of the house we haven’t accessed yet. The one near the wall by the refrigerator.
“Well,” Mom rubs her hands together and avoids looking at my face. “It’s a duplex.”
“What the hell is a duplex?”
Mom sighs. “Language, Annie. A duplex is a floor plan that includes two houses in one. The other side of this wall is a mirror image of our unit. The owner rents them separately.”
I resist the urge to run my hand down my face. Instead, I just sort of freeze, the only movement of my face is my eyes blinking. “Annie, it’s not bad at all. It’s still a house of our own with parking, a yard, a patio, a washer and dryer in the unit, and two bedrooms. It’ll be great.” She turns around and starts to walk away, “Come see the bedrooms. They’re pretty good sizes.”
I earmark a few of my important questions for the time when they can be most valuable for my cause. Like asking about the noise of the neighbor when we actually hear a neighbor or complaining about the yard being used by the neighbor’s cat once I see a small animal run.
I follow Mom back through the living room to the other side of our section of the house. She shows me the washer and dryer, the bathroom where I have to resist complaining it is obviously smaller than the old one, and the two identical bedrooms where we will be sleeping more like sisters than mother and daughter. Seriously, the bedrooms have one of those entrances where you go through a doorway and turn left for my room and right for her room. They’re the same size and even have carbon-copy closets back to back.
This is where I stop and look at her quizzically. “Are you seriously happy with this arrangement?” I ask. Because I can get behind all of this if Mom does less crying here.
She drapes her arm over my shoulder and rests her head on mine. “This will be great. You’ll see.”
I sigh. “Alright, I’ll try to love it,” I tell her. I mean it, I really will give this my best shot. Because, what are my other options?
Mom stands up straight and heads to my bedroom window, which happens to look out on the front of the house and the weird U-shaped driveway. She squeals and claps her hands together. “The moving truck is here,” she calls. “Our furniture has arrived.”
Annie Lewis moves into a duplex: two houses separated by a shared wall. The story gets interesting when she starts hearing banging coming from the other house. As time goes by, these strange occurrences become more suspicious than the simple assumption that the neighbours like a midnight snack. As it seems like Annie and her mother are actually without duplex neighbours, this raises an important question: who is making Noises From the Other Side?
As much as I have come across phenomenal characters, intriguing stories, and even a witty narrator recently, it has been a while since I fell in love with a character. Annie became that character for me. She came to life in a way that made me feel like we walked this journey together. It was like being taken back in time to the experiences that made me love reading in the first place. A huge thank you from the depth of my heart to Tabitha Shipley for capturing the little nuances of this adolescent so well.
You know when your mind registers an appropriate reaction to something but that reaction doesn't actually externalise? Like when people respond with "LOL" because they are laughing in their head but just smiling outwardly? Well, this is one of those books that made me actually laugh out loud and made my eyes bulge out as if they want to escape their sockets and pull in a shocked breath even though I already had my suspicions about something. This was just exquisite writing. It was attentive to the small details that manifest novels that are must-reads or later become classics.
As per the given disclaimer in the book, there were multiple errors but none of them were major enough to hamper my reading thus I would still encourage you to give it a read. But the errors were enough to make it impossible for me to give it its deserved 5-star rating. Hopefully, you are as immersed in it as I was. If you are in the mood to meet a fellow book lover, open this book and get reading. If you want a book that will shock you and raise some important questions, this might cater to that desire.