Joe Goldberg is crazy smart. Hmm, let me rephrase. Joe Goldberg is crazy. He works at a rare book store in New York City’s East Village and when Guinevere Beck aka Beck walks into the store one day, Joe is instantly smitten.
You didn’t walk in there for books, Beck. You didn’t have to say my name. You didn’t have to smile or listen or take me in. But you did.
Caroline Kepnes’ debut novel You has won copious praise and has also been turned into a series on Lifetime. Is it deserving of all the accolades? Let’s break it down.
1. Joe isn’t your garden variety psycho. He’s well-read and funny and often times he’s more sympathetic than Beck. After their chance meeting, Joe sets out to learn everything he can about Beck, an easy enough task since millennials put the minutiae of their daily lives online for everyone to see. It’s pretty easy for Joe to infiltrate Beck’s life.
What do we know about Joe? Not too much. He lives in a shitty apartment, doesn’t seem to have any friends and has clearly earned the trust (and the keys to the kingdom) of his employer, Mr. Mooney.
2. Beck is an MFA student who seems to enjoy (rough) sex and is pining for a guy called Benji when Joe first meets her. Truthfully, she’s not that interesting, but I guess that’s not really the point. She’s just a vessel for Joe to pour all of his psychopathy into. Whether any of the attraction Beck feels for Joe is real, or whether the appeal of Joe’s total devotion to winning her affections is just part of her own narcissism, it’s hard to say.
3. The plot actually moves along relatively slowly for a novel that is meant to be a thriller. That’s because it’s over-written…sometimes it seems to take forever for anything to happen. Joe imagines all the times he is going to have sex with Beck before he actually has sex with her, and when they finally do the deed, it’s a horrible disappointment to them both. Talk about your performance anxiety. Other sub-plots bog down the main action of the story…the will he won’t he get the girl and from there, what’s going to happen?
That said, the writing is terrific. Kepnes does an amazing job of making Joe seem both believable, creepy and, on some level at least, likeable. He is patient and volatile in equal measure. Ultimately, it’s his obsession with all things Beck that is his undoing, and the end of his relationship with Beck, when it comes, unravels in record time.
And it’s over . You begin to yelp and spring at me and I don’t like you right now. You make me do terrible things like hold you down and clap my hand over your mouth. You make me twist your arms and bear down on you, and this is our bed.
Look, You doesn’t tread any new water, but that doesn’t mean that, of its type, it isn’t worth a look if you enjoy crazy stalkers.
I thought if I waited a few days after finishing Courtney Summers’ latest book Sadie, I would have a better chance of articulating my feelings coherently. Sadly, I don’t think I am actually going to be able to adequately express all the ways I loved (and hated) this book.
different worlds. Claudia lives with her stable and loving parents; Monday lives with her single mom and three siblings in Washington’s Ed Borough Complex, a part of town Claudia isn’t allowed to visit without an adult.
just off Piazza della Erbe, tells another story of a soldier who fell in love with the daughter of a rich and powerful man. He would not let his daughter marry the soldier, convincing her that he was only interested in her money. She told her lover that he must prove himself to her, so he threw himself in the well. When she realized what he had done, she threw herself in after him, thus uniting the lovers for eternity. Sad that the motorcycle is in the picture, but you can see the two lovers at the front of the well.
The library was housed upstairs in this building. Unfortunately, you’re not allowed to visit it as a tourist. I actually couldn’t quite believe that. Bologna is a university town and there were bookstores galore. Sadly, I don’t read Italian. 🙂 It’s also a city made up of arcades or porticos…40 kilometers of them to be exact. They are a nice reprieve from the sun.
Jam Gallahue just hasn’t been able to recover from the death of her boyfriend Reeve Maxfield. “I loved him,” she explains, “and then he died, and almost a year passed and no one knew what to do with me.” As a last resort, Jam’s parents send her to The Wooden Barn, “a boarding school for ’emotionally fragile, highly intelligent’ teenagers.”
When I was a kid, I had pen pals. Lots of them. I think I started writing letters when I was about seven. We moved away from Winnipeg where we had been living for a couple years. I had to leave my best friend, Lynne, behind and we kept exchanging letters for many years – up until recently when my Christmas card to her was returned ‘address unknown.’
her younger sister, Marie, in San Diego. Their mother, Iris, has leukemia, and Vanessa and her sisters often accompany her to a clinic in Mexico where she is treated with the controversial drug, Laetrile.
I feel heartless for saying it – but I didn’t particularly like M.L. Stedman’s first novel The Light Between Oceans. I’ve had the book for a while, but it was last month’s book club pick, so I finally had occasion to read it. [insert long-suffering sigh]
late: her parents’ divorce; her father’s quicky marriage to Kathy; their subsequent move from Ashland, Ohio to Jackson, Mississippi. When Mim overhears her father and stepmother talking to the principal, she’s convinced that her biological mother is sick and makes the decision to hop a Greyhound and travel the 947 miles back to Ohio to see her.
Gah! This book, you guys.
The Ludic Reader 