Just a couple more days until Christmas a I’m finding it so hard to find time to just sit down and read. There is a giant stack of presents I need to wrap, cookies to decorate, kids to entertain. I know its the most wonderful time of the year, but it’s exhausting!
I’ve been reading The Flight Attendant by Chris Bohjalian for the past week! I’m really enjoying it and it’s taking that long. Ugh, this is how regular people must feel about how long it takes to get through a book! I like flying through a book but there’s just no time. Its hard when I really want to write at least one review a week!
How is your reading going? Luckily I have read a couple I was keeping in the queue to post about, like this one–Watch Me by Jody Gehrman.
And next week, I’d like to write a top five books I read this year. But that’s going to take a lot of reflection to decide on just five!
From the Publisher:
For fans of dark and twisty psychological thrillers, Watch Me is a riveting novel of suspense about how far obsession can go.
Kate Youngblood is disappearing. Muddling through her late 30s as a creative writing professor at Blackwood college, she’s dangerously close to never being noticed again. The follow-up novel to her successful debut tanked. Her husband left her for a woman ten years younger. She’s always been bright, beautiful, independent and a little wild, but now her glow is starting to vanish. She’s heading into an age where her eyes are less blue, her charm worn out, and soon no one will ever truly look at her, want to know her, again.
Except one.
Sam Grist is Kate’s most promising student. An unflinching writer with razor-sharp clarity who gravitates towards dark themes and twisted plots, his raw talent is something Kate wants to nurture into literary success. But he’s not there solely to be the best writer. He’s been watching her. Wanting her. Working his way to her for years.
As Sam slowly makes his way into Kate’s life, they enter a deadly web of dangerous lies and forbidden desire. But how far will his fixation go? And how far will she allow it?
A gripping novel exploring intense obsession and illicit attraction, Jody Gehrman introduces a world where what you desire most may be the most dangerous thing of all.
My Review:
When I first read the description for Watch Me on Netgalley, by Jody Gehrman, the book sounded right up my alley, even though I had never heard of the author. I figured she was probably a debut author. But now I see that she is a playwright AND the author of eleven previous books. Which is surprising. But seeing how at least one is a YA novel and most of the reviews for her books call them “fun,” I see why I may not have picked her up in the past.
But seriously, it’s surprising that this is her first thriller because it was pretty spot on. That said, I wasn’t personally a huge fan of Kate. Maybe it’s because she is the type of adult I don’t really identify with. She just seemed kind of whiny and oblivious to the fact that her student Sam is obsessed with her and will be the end of her career if she isn’t careful.
She’s in her late thirties, recently divorced from her husband (who left her for a younger woman) and is clearly jealous of her best friend’s new baby and all the attention she is giving her family over Kate, her best friend. I mean, I get it, I just find it so odd that someone would actually still be so immature as they approach middle age that they need to feel wounded somehow that their best friend would actually like to build a foundation and a life.
So Kate isn’t amazing. But the book was a surprisingly solid thriller. I believed that Sam was a real person (albeight bat shit crazy) and I even believed Kate was a real person even though she really kind of sucked as a person. There weren’t a lot of twists and turns, but I appreciated how the story progressed and built to a satisfying end.
So, if you are a thriller reader, check this one out, it’s worth the read. If you are a Jody Gehrman fan, probably check it out although it certainly sounds like a departure from her previous work. Thanks to Netgalley and St. Martin’s Griffin for an e-galley in exchange for my honest review.
Buy it January 23!
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