I absolutely adored the cover of this book, and combined with all the hype surrounding this book, I borrowed a copy from my library right away. My mood these days is making me lean towards thrillers, so I thought this would be a great fit for me.
Synopsis (Goodreads): Amber Patterson is fed up. She’s tired of being a nobody: a plain, invisible woman who blends into the background. She deserves more—a life of money and power like the one blond-haired, blue-eyed goddess Daphne Parrish takes for granted. To everyone in the exclusive town of Bishops Harbor, Connecticut, Daphne and her husband, Jackson—the beautiful philanthropist and the confident real estate mogul—are a golden couple straight out of a fairytale, blessed with two lovely young daughters.
Amber’s envy could eat her alive . . . if she didn’t have a plan. Amber uses Daphne’s compassion and caring to insinuate herself into the family’s life—the first step in a meticulous scheme to undermine her. Before long, Amber is Daphne’s closest confidante, traveling to Europe with the Parrish family, and growing closer to Jackson. But a skeleton from her past may undermine everything that Amber has worked towards, and if it is discovered, her well-laid plan may fall to pieces.
Review: This book is uncannily similar to The Wife Between Us… but it’s not as good. If you haven’t seen my review of The Wife Between Us, check it out because I was raving about that one! It’s hard for me not to compare these two thrillers when they are so similar, but I will try to limit my comments to just my impressions of this novel.
The story is told in 3 parts. Part 1 is completely from Amber’s perspective, Part 2 is from Daphne’s point of view, and Part 3 is a combination of the two. I wasn’t expecting that the story would be split in this way in the beginning, but it soon became clear why. After just halfway through Part 1, I had already figured out the way the story was going to go. It was just too easy for me to put the pieces together. Now, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Even if it is relatively simple, if the story is written well it can hold my attention.
And it was written well. By this, I mean that the story was easy to read and flowed well. However, the story wasn’t interesting. It got tiring to listen to all the different ways that Amber infiltrated Daphne’s life. I get that the author (or rather, authors) was trying to set the scene, but it didn’t need to be this long.
When Part 2 began, I was excited to read from Daphne’s perspective. But I quickly became disinterested. Why? Well, I had the same dilemma of being told everything and shown nothing. I don’t know why this is suddenly a trend with novels, but I don’t like it. It gives the story less depth and keeps me less interested because I just can’t connect with the characters.
Now, I gave this novel a trigger warning because it has a lot of instances of abuse that might disturb readers. These instances are described quite vividly, which I didn’t mind because it actually made me feel some emotion. However, there was a big problem that I had with this novel, and I’ve been shifting between saying it and potentially spoiling part of the story or just keeping it to myself. I decided to go with the former option. NO ONE DESERVES ABUSE. Regardless of how bad a person is or how cruel, nobody deserves to be abused. It really bothered me that this novel tried to justify this and I just couldn’t get over that.
So my overall thoughts about this book? The Wife Between Us was better. Unfortunately, I’m going to have to give this a 2/5 stars.
Happy reading ~
I own this one, but haven’t been able to read it yet! Hoping I enjoy it! Great review.
I hope you do, too! Thanks 😊