Jeff Sexton
You Think You Know Me. I fully cop to being one of those people that avoids my hometown in my adult life (other than visiting family members who continue to live there) specifically because high school was hell and I don't care to catch up with pretty well anyone from that era of my life. (To be fair, the feeling is largely mutual. :D)
So for me, a group of former HS friends deciding to catch up by spending a weekend together to celebrate the upcoming 40th birthday of one of them is... weird.
And yet... Danvers absolutely makes the idea work. The first part of the tale is largely "establishing shots", with each of our four friends introducing themselves and where they currently are in life as they begin to travel to the meeting point on Cape Cod. This section is admittedly slow... but then, so is this section in many of the best thriller/ horror/ disaster movies or stories.
Once everyone begins catching up, the action begins to pick up - including a scene that reminded me of a long ago college Service Spring Break incident, but to reveal that tale here would get into spoiler territory for the book. Hell, I didn't even connect it until I began writing that last sentence. ;) From here, the tale goes less introspective and, eventually, more into "what the hell is going on" / "who can we trust" territory, with a fair amount of exploration of the common theme of "who we are on social media isn't always who we are in real life" that has been explored so much over the last decade. While Danvers doesn't really add much to that particular discourse with this tale, she does use it to add a touch of depth to her own story.
I will note that the mystery, once it arrives, was perhaps given away a touch too early with one particular detail that one of the characters revealed in her opening monologue. So for those that just cannot stand solving the mystery before the author reveals it... well... "you think you know me". In other words... there may yet be more to this tale...
The epilogue in particular offers a stinger that takes this seeming one-off tale and offers the possibility that it could in fact become a series, which those of you who pick this book up with the "Book 1" on its title would already know. (I had received an Advance Review Copy of the text months before publication, though I only read the book about 2 weeks before due to other ARC commitments.)
Ultimately, this actually has a blend of the approaches used in say the "Widows" series by Kimberly Belle, Cate Holahan, Layne Fargo, and Vanessa Lillie - where each author seemingly takes one of four widows and they combine to craft an intriguing and rompy series - and the meta-publishing discussions of say Romantic Friction by Lori Gold - among others - and yet still manages to be fairly uniquely its own thing even with those similarities. It will be interesting to see where Danvers takes this budding series and how long she intends to have it run.
Very much recommended.
Originally posted at bookanon.com.
You Think You Know Me. I fully cop to being one of those people that avoids my hometown in my adult life (other than visiting family members who continue to live there) specifically because high school was hell and I don't care to catch up with pretty well anyone from that era of my life. (To be fair, the feeling is largely mutual. :D)
So for me, a group of former HS friends deciding to catch up by spending a weekend together to celebrate the upcoming 40th birthday of one of them is... weird.
And yet... Danvers absolutely makes the idea work. The first part of the tale is largely "establishing shots", with each of our four friends introducing themselves and where they currently are in life as they begin to travel to the meeting point on Cape Cod. This section is admittedly slow... but then, so is this section in many of the best thriller/ horror/ disaster movies or stories.
Once everyone begins catching up, the action begins to pick up - including a scene that reminded me of a long ago college Service Spring Break incident, but to reveal that tale here would get into spoiler territory for the book. Hell, I didn't even connect it until I began writing that last sentence. ;) From here, the tale goes less introspective and, eventually, more into "what the hell is going on" / "who can we trust" territory, with a fair amount of exploration of the common theme of "who we are on social media isn't always who we are in real life" that has been explored so much over the last decade. While Danvers doesn't really add much to that particular discourse with this tale, she does use it to add a touch of depth to her own story.
I will note that the mystery, once it arrives, was perhaps given away a touch too early with one particular detail that one of the characters revealed in her opening monologue. So for those that just cannot stand solving the mystery before the author reveals it... well... "you think you know me". In other words... there may yet be more to this tale...
The epilogue in particular offers a stinger that takes this seeming one-off tale and offers the possibility that it could in fact become a series, which those of you who pick this book up with the "Book 1" on its title would already know. (I had received an Advance Review Copy of the text months before publication, though I only read the book about 2 weeks before due to other ARC commitments.)
Ultimately, this actually has a blend of the approaches used in say the "Widows" series by Kimberly Belle, Cate Holahan, Layne Fargo, and Vanessa Lillie - where each author seemingly takes one of four widows and they combine to craft an intriguing and rompy series - and the meta-publishing discussions of say Romantic Friction by Lori Gold - among others - and yet still manages to be fairly uniquely its own thing even with those similarities. It will be interesting to see where Danvers takes this budding series and how long she intends to have it run.
Very much recommended.
Originally posted at bookanon.com.
