Lonely? Feeling unrequited love? Witness a suicide? Be careful.
Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen
March 3, 2020
St. Martin’s Press
Blurb: Shay Miller wants to find love, but it eludes her. She wants to be fulfilled, but her job is a dead end. She wants to belong, but her life is increasingly lonely.
Until Shay meets the Moore sisters. Cassandra and Jane live a life of glamorous perfection, and always get what they desire. When they invite Shay into their circle, everything seems to get better.
Shay would die for them to like her.
She may have to.
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After a couple of chapters in which I felt sure You Are Not Alone by Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen was not going to be for me, I fell under its spell and found myself unable to put the book down.
Shay is like a lot of people out there. Not quite fitting in, not feeling loved any more since her roommate Sean, the guy she’s secretly in love with, has a girlfriend who is more live in than not. Then she witnesses the suicide of a woman who could be her, who looks strangely like her, except for the empty eyes. The suicide haunts her to the extent that she starts investigating the woman’s life and then unwittingly falls into a situation that, at first, seems to be a wonderful thing. She befriends two enigmatic women, the Moore sisters, who may hold the key to ending her loneliness.
For the most part, I loved the way this story was told. We are introduced to the various players through alternating chapters in which we discover key bits about their lives and their involvement with the enigmatic Moore sisters. The Moore sisters are also given their own chapters.
As a reader, this is a popcorn fest, where you are literally swishing pages and munching down on content. Besides the initial slow start, the only hiccup for me came near the end when I no longer wanted to read the alternating chapters going back in time because stuff was happening and I wanted to read that NOW. This meant that I skimmed that last alternating chapter. Seriously, if you skim a chapter because you don’t want to read it and want to read the material that’s happening NOW, that chapter is in the wrong place!
Regardless, this is a thrilling book after the first couple of chapters. I felt sorry for Shay and then inspired by her courage. I loved her addiction to statistics and how she made it work for her. She’s a character I’d love to read more about.
I received an ARC in exchange for an honest review.
rating:
4 out of 5 butterflies
“Seriously, if you skim a chapter because you don’t want to read it and want to read the material that’s happening NOW, that chapter is in the wrong place!” I haven’t ever thought of it this way before, but YES! This is exactly what is going on. I’ve read books that do that back and forth thing on time and either am not bothered by it or even really like how it builds the story. Then other times, it annoys me and I skim. Wrong place is probably the best way of describing it, though I’m sure some of those would have been best of they’d just ended up in the recycle bin instead.
Yes. Unfortunately the information in the chapter was reasonably important, except by this time, I knew what was going on so it wasn’t intrinsic. Placement is important. The most important thing when you reach a point of heightened action is never to let that go. Keep the action going because that’s what your reader wants. It’s the climax! To break the action at that point? Either stupid or egotistical or something else that I can’t fathom.