GENRE: Fiction/Suspense
MY RATING: 4 stars, bordering on 3
SYNOPSIS: When a beautiful aspiring writer strides into the East Village bookstore where Joe Goldberg works, he does what anyone would do: he Googles the name on her credit card.
There is only one Guinevere Beck in New York City. She has a public Facebook account and Tweets incessantly, telling Joe everything he needs to know: she is simply Beck to her friends, she went to Brown University, she lives on Bank Street, and she’ll be at a bar in Brooklyn tonight—the perfect place for a “chance” meeting.
As Joe invisibly and obsessively takes control of Beck’s life, he orchestrates a series of events to ensure Beck finds herself in his waiting arms. Moving from stalker to boyfriend, Joe transforms himself into Beck’s perfect man, all while quietly removing the obstacles that stand in their way—even if it means murder.
A terrifying exploration of how vulnerable we all are to stalking and manipulation, debut author Caroline Kepnes delivers a razor-sharp novel for our hyper-connected digital age.
MY THOUGHTS: You'd think a book written from a stalker's point of view would be interesting, right? It was for awhile but was very repetitive and never-ending. Nothing was happening and it dragged. I did love reading from a stalker's perspective. Sadly we didn't get any background information on him and we only know one thing, something awful, about his past.
I absolutely hated Beck from the start. I've never read a more self-absorbed character in my life. There wasn't anything interesting about her. It's not surprising to me that the Lifetime series made her blonde though she's brunette in the novel.
I don't like the nonsense of the cage being in the bookstore's basement. I'm picturing the cage from The Silence of the Lambs with a drawer you can put stuff in and the person in the cage can get the object out of but I don't know if my mental image is accurate. The story was very dragged out and I almost couldn't take it. Most of Joe's dialogue is his inner monologue and damn, is he funny...and deranged. I laughed out loud many times. Unfortunately he speaks (thinks) in run-on sentences the majority of the time so it gets annoying really fast. For that reason I won't be reading the sequel. I read the first two chapters, which were in the back of my edition of You, and it was just like reading You; the writing style was identical.
Beck is twenty-four and Joe's age wasn't given. I think I read that he was a child in 2001 so they're both millennials. I can't imagine why the Gen X author was drawn to write about millennials. I read that the Lifetime/Netflix series made many changes/added characters so I won't be watching any of it.
