An Anonymous Girl
Print Length: 372 pages
ISBN: 1250133734
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press (January 8, 2019)
Publication Date: January 8, 2019
Publisher’s Description: “When Jessica Farris signs up for a psychology study conducted by the mysterious Dr. Shields, she thinks all she’ll have to do is answer a few questions, collect her money, and leave.
But as the questions grow more and more intense and invasive and the sessions become outings where Jess is told what to wear and how to act, she begins to feel as though Dr. Shields may know what she’s thinking…and what she’s hiding.
As Jess’s paranoia grows, it becomes clear that she can no longer trust what in her life is real, and what is one of Dr. Shields’ manipulative experiments. Caught in a web of deceit and jealousy, Jess quickly learns that some obsessions can be deadly.
From the authors of the blockbuster bestseller The Wife Between Us comes an electrifying new novel about doubt, passion, and just how much you can trust someone.”
My Review
I have to say that despite the hype surrounding the release of this novel, I can only give it two stars. The description drew me in, but the book failed to fully deliver on its promises.
It begins in first person POV with the heroine, Jessica, narrating in present tense. It takes a while to get much information about her other than her profession and the fact that she’s strapped for cash. There’s a lot of “showing”, but, you know what? Sometimes you’ve just got to “tell” to get certain info out there and it is slow to come. Sure, I guess they wanted her to be anonymous even to the reader, but it meant that I personally struggled to care about Jessica at all.
The book also alternates narrators every chapter with the other half of them being told by Dr. Shields in second person, present tense, with a passive voice. If you don’t know what passive voice means, it’s, “The drink was set on the table. The chair was pulled out.” It was annoying in my opinion rather than giving me whatever kind of experience the authors intended. I simply didn’t care about Dr. Shields. The antagonist could have just as easily have been a sentient rock.
Of course, I won’t be letting any spoilers slip, but I will say this: The premise itself was intriguing: Can you really trust anyone? And, as the story got going, I enjoyed the plot. The twists were heavily telegraphed, so there were no real surprises for me, but it held my interest enough to finish. Jessica was a TSTL archetype right up until the very end and earned quite a few eyerolls. I felt that her naïveté would have been more believable if she’d been written as much younger than twenty-eight (age gathered from context).
All in all, the unnatural narration style didn’t add anything to the story. In fact, I feel that it would have been a much better novel with Lydia Shields’ POV chapters eliminated entirely. It would have allowed me to connect with Jessica without the antagonist’s interruptions and it would have let all those promised twists and turns actually take me by surprise.
About the Authors
GREER HENDRICKS is the coauthor of the New York Times bestseller The Wife Between Us. Prior to becoming a novelist, she spent over two decades as an editor at Simon & Schuster. She obtained her master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University, and her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Allure, and Publisher’s Weekly. She lives in Manhattan with her husband and two children.
SARAH PEKKANEN is the internationally and USA Today bestselling author of eight previous solo novels and the coauthor of the New York Times bestseller The Wife Between Us. A former investigative journalist and award-winning feature writer, she has published work in The Washington Post, USA Today, and many others. She is the mother of three sons and lives just outside Washington, D.C.