One of my goals in 2021 is to read more. See other books I've read or listened to here.
The Wife Upstairs by Rachel Hawkins has been making the rounds of BookTube since it came out in 2020.
Jane is escaping her past and trying to keep her head above water. She takes work in an affluent neighborhood, in part bc thats where the money is, but also bc she wants to imagine herself living there as well. When she does becomes engrained in the community she gets more than she bargained for.
I had seen this book on BookTube and it seemed like a fun little thriller. This was also one of the first really current book I got out of a LFL (Little Free Library). I had seen very modern books in them before, but this is the one I was interested in enough to pick up. Other than the idea that this was a thriller, I really didn’t know what to expect from this book. I found out that this was loosely a Jane Eyre retelling or at least loosely based on that classic. I have never read that book and am not really interested in that classic. Perhaps if I had read it, I might have enjoyed this book more? This book is the first in a short stint of contemporary mysteries set in modern day that I recently read but did not work for me. I find that the modern language (especially the over use of cursing) was jarring and off putting. I thought the plot was lacking nuance and I was not connected to any of the characters. The mystery and thriller aspect was neither all that mysterious or thrilling. This was one of the several books that I read that had duel narration and I find that that is not a writing device that I like. This book had an unreliable narrator, but I found that it capitalized on that idea that if a woman struggles with trauma, illness, or neurotic tendencies, she must be crazy and not taken seriously. I was very disappointed with the way that stress and trauma is dealt with and how the stress of a young woman is discounted as mental illness, and unreliability, untrustworthiness, and she is considered therefore a bad person, not only by the characters, but by the author to the readers. There were a few interesting ideas in this book, like notes being passed though books, kleptomania, and past traumas that are out of our control informing our adult lives. But over all they weren’t handled particularly well and were not enough to keep this book from being a shallow and empty read. I cannot recommend this book.
Have you read a book you would NOT suggest people read lately?
This book is featured in my March Wrap Up.