You by Caroline Kepnes

A book review of You by Caroline Kepnes.  Post may contain affiliate links.

I fell into this book with the first few sentences and found it insanely hard to put down. This is my kind of book. That first sentences that I was talking about is this, “You walk into the bookstore and you keep your hand on the door to make sure it doesn’t slam. You smile, embarrassed to be a nice girl, and your nails are bare and your V-neck sweater is beige and it’s impossible to know if you’re wearing a bra but I don’t think that you are.” It’s a pretty simple few sentences actually, but the clue is in that one small part, where he says that she is smiling because she is embarrassed to be a nice girl. With one glance, he is is already obsessed with her and already showing his psychotic belief that he knows what she is feeling and thinking.

You is told in a first person narrative, from inside the head of Joe, an obsessed psychotic stalker. What makes it different than most first person narratives is that as Joe is talking about Beck, he is calling her You, as if he is telling her the story. It really works well.

This is not a scary story per se, but there is plenty of creepy obsession and some crazy twists and turns. I won’t give anything away, but it gets pretty crazy.