REVIEW for You

Thank you to the wonderful people at Simon & Schuster Canada for sending me a copy of this book.


TITLE:                You

AUTHOR:          Caroline Kepnes

GENRE:             Contemporary Fiction/Thriller

RATING:            

Okay, full disclosure.  What first drew me to this book was the "bookstore" aspect. Yep, I am sucker for any book set in a bookstore, although to be fair, the bookstore is simply the basis where the two main characters meet.

I haven't been reading many thrillers (if I can use this term here) for a while now because so many of them are predictable.  Well, this book is anything but predictable and actually, the first word that came to mind is creepy, but not in a horror/supernatural way - rather, in a "this could happen in real life and scares me" kind of way.

Joe Goldberg works in a bookstore and he meets Guinevere Beck.  What should have simply been a brief encounter between two random people quickly turns into an escalating game of stalking which left me feeling scared as hell.

Its amazing to me that a book like this can even be written - but it makes sense.  It has become so easy for people to "follow" other people now and this book takes this aspect of our "social media" driven life and turns it on its ear but pushing to the brink of just how scary and horrible it is to actually put your life on display for everyone to read about.

Yes, I am conscious of the irony of my last sentence, considering I am posting this review on a public blog - but this book made me think and it made me scared.  Saying this book entertained me would be wrong because this kind of deprivation can hardly be called entertaining, but it was completely compelling and an engaging and commanding read.

I hated it for being so possible and loved it for being so "true".