You Are Not Alone by Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen | Book Review

★★★☆☆
March 12th – 14th

I think this book was supposed to be a thriller. According to Goodreads, it was marketed as a thriller. Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen’s first two novels were thrillers. This one got confused along the way.

This book follows Shay, a woman in her early thirties who’s currently between jobs, stuck in an apartment with her roommate and his new girlfriend, friendless, and somewhat hopeless. Shay is is also fairly pretentious, constantly referring to the types of TedTalks she’s listening to in an effort to make her seem smart. She’s obsessed with data, keeping facts and numbers listed in her “data book”.

After Shay witnesses a woman commit suicide by jumping in front of a New York City subway, Shay finds that she’s attracted to the mystery of who this woman was, and finding out has disastrous consequences. The woman, Amanda, was a nurse involved in a close-knit ring of friends who have dark secrets and unexpected consequences.

This book did not know what it wanted to be. The main character seemed oblivious to the fact that she was being targeted or persecuted until the final third of the book, and when she did, she was able to solve everything with a few phone calls. Though every book requires some suspension of disbelief, I had a really hard time believing the level of convenience that this book had.

The entirety of the book hinged on a plot twist which I must have guessed very early into the story, because I assumed it was an established fact. When the twist was revealed, I found myself very confused. I guess the closest I can come to explaining this is if you open the fridge and have eggs inside, you expect to see eggs inside the fridge. Every time you open it, there are the eggs. But if someone then comes up to you and says “I have a surprise! There are eggs in the fridge!” You’re going to be confused. Because the eggs were there the whole time.

This book had eggs the whole time, and I was extremely confused.

The type of domestic thriller that this author duo write isn’t really my cup of tea. I may try more of their books in the future, but both of the ones I’ve read haven’t really resonated or stayed with me.

-Siobhan