You by Caroline Kepnes

Gut Instinct Rating - 2

Characters - 2

Believability for type and topics - 4

Similarity to other books - 5

Writing Style - 3

Excitement Factor - 1.5

Story Line - 2

Title Relevance - 5

Cover art - 2

To read or not to read? Not worth reading unless you want to see what the hype is like I did. (Without the artwork and title factored in, this book only earned itself a 2.78.)

Goodreads users gave this book a 3.83. I think it was more deserving of a 2.94.

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Published in 2014

Pages: 422

Publishing Company: Atria/Emily Bestler Books

Number of books by author: 2 (A duology; sequel to You is Hidden Bodies)

Genre: Thriller, Fiction, Contemporary, Mystery, Adult

Referred by: EmmaReadsTooMuch

This book was way overrated. I don't really have much to say that's positive or negative because the book was so "blah." The characters were so uninspired. Joe was a stalker. Plain and simple. We know that from the beginning. But we assume that he's harmless. That his love is drawn from curiosity from her name on the credit card, that he sees after some innocent flirting. That's what the cover story leads you to believe. But that's all wrong. This book is not the way it's presented. I know, I know - it tells you on the back that there's a potential murder! But, just because there's a potential murder, doesn't mean it's potentially heinous, or that it's potentially predetermined. This book is just way off track from what I wanted to read. I'm not one for trigger warnings, but there probably should've been one on here. This book will make you paranoid, and not in the writer did their job kinda way. In a, this writer is fucked up kinda way. The entire book was obsessive and annoying. I wasn't triggered. I wanted to pull a trigger. Any trigger to make it end. It was so bloody repetitive. If I wasn't seeing this book everywhere, if it hadn't been on my TBR for over a year, I would not have finished it. Every single character was whining about their horrible, tragic life, except Ethan. Every single character was trying to lift someone else up. It was just so cyclical. Someone whines, someone abuses, someone boosts the esteem, repeat. If nothing else, the cycle of abuse and stalking was at least realistic. Until the end. She reveal something, and it just ruins the entire story line... I should've dropped this believability score down even more, honestly. Also, without spoiling anything, this story shouldn't have ended the way it did. There shouldn't been far more conflict. The writing style was fine. Again, it was 375 pages of repetitiveness... the first 22 pages were fine, and the remaining 25 pages were fine. Everything else in between could've basically been cut down, or cut out entirely. The story was so boring, because it was so repetitive. I mean, what was the purpose of the "tests?" I still don't know. None of that made any sense, so we wasted like, 30 pages. I know it takes like, 1 tree to print 1 million pages or something extreme like that, but if you consider she probably had 25,000 copies of the book printed, times 30 pages (just an estimate here...), that's well, a lot of pages... so that's an entire tree that she killed. I like trees. And I don't like them being wasted on pointless filler. At least the title made sense... the cover art could've been better. If it were me, I wouldn't read this. This one is definitely going back to the store.