Parents Weekend by Alex Finlay ~ a Review

by Susan Roberts

 

In the glow of their children’s exciting first year of college at a small private school in Northern California, five families plan on a night of dinner and cocktails for the opening festivities of Parents Weekend. As the parents stay out way past their bedtimes, their kids—five residents of Campisi Hall—never show up at dinner.

Amazon affiliate links are used on this site.  A free book was provided for an honest review.

May 2025; Minotaur Books; 978-1250360724
audio, ebook, print (320 pages); psychological thriller

It's Parents Weekend at a small private college in California, and the parents are all happy with plans to spend a weekend with their child -- the kids not so much.  Once you are away from home, your friends become more important than your family, and that was definitely the case with these 5 kids.  Even though there were some issues between parents and kids, the parents were all surprised when not one of the five students showed up for dinner.  Some of them were immediately concerned, and the others weren't too worried until the next morning.  Along with the missing students, there was a lot of dysfunction with their families.  Blaine's parents were divorced..  The mother was with the State Department and surrounded by bodyguards at all times.  Stella didn't get along with her parents, and they were fighting all of the time to his infidelity.   Libby's parents are grieving a lost son.  Felix was being raised by a single mother and he was being bullied at school.  Even though the main plot of the book was about the missing children, there were a lot of subplots about the parents and their problems.  I really can't say much more about the plot without possibly giving you a spoiler, but I will say that this was a real page-turner.  The ending was a big surprise for me, and some of the events that led up to the ending kept me turning pages until the end.

My main problem with this book was the extensive cast of characters.  With five missing students, there were a lot of parents, school officials, and police personnel.  Many of them had their own chapters, and it was difficult to keep up with which parents belonged to which kids and to which spouse.  It got easier as I got further into the book, but in the beginning, I had to make a chart to keep up with the characters.

This author has a very extensive backlog of books, and this is my first book by him.  I enjoyed Parents Weekend so much that I plan to order some of his earlier books.

Buy Parents Weekend at Amazon

Susan Roberts grew up in Michigan but loves the laid-back life at her home in the Piedmont area of North Carolina where she is three hours from the beach to the east and the mountains in the west.  She reads almost anything but her favorite genres are Southern Fiction and Historical Fiction

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