A Simple Favor

Rich and fabulous Emily asks a fellow mom, Stephanie, for a simple favor: to pick up her son after school and watch him one day. So starts a friendship. Then Emily disappears and Stephanie inserts herself into the mystery, blah, blah, blah. I can't even write a proper synopsis for this convoluted “psychological thriller.”

I watched the movie first and I thought, “Wow, this movie is cheesy but the story could be good. I bet the book is so much better.” Yeah, I was wrong. The movie is so much better. Here's the thing, the story could still be decent. But why is it so cheesy and light? There's really no twists, no surprises. And all the characters are terrible people. Which is, again, fine if written well. I can't really think of anything to say other than there's so much Jerry Springer content that it felt like a VC Andrews but without the good writing. And the ending is so blah.

Update: My husband just stopped by my computer as I was writing this and said I was so mean and that someone put a lot of time into this. Listen, I know they did. I get that it's a debut novel. But I'm not here to make friends, I'm here to write honest reviews. I'm not trying to be mean, I'm sure she's a lovely person and great teacher. But this book is just truly bad. Yikes.

if you are real bad at solving mysteries before characters do/information is revealed, i recommend this book

it gets 3 stars because it got really gay within the last 60 pages

One of the most unbelievable parts of the story is the fact that anyone would read the boring blog posts written by Stephanie, let alone enough people for them to actually comment on the posts. The story should have been interesting and thrilling considering everything involved (love, murder, crime, adultery, incest) but instead, the characters were flat and lacked any kind of personality that would make you like, care or feel sorry for any of them.

The main character - Stephanie, could have been left out of the story completely and an almost identical plot could've happened. To be honest, it might have been better without her character. Actually - scratch that, it would've been the plot of Gone Girl with worse writing.