An Anonymous Girl and other November Reads

I finished nine books in the month of November:

The First Conspiracy by Brad Meltzer and John Mensch (ARC)
A Gathering of Shadows by V.E. Schwab
An Anonymous Girl by Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen (ARC)
Before and Again by Barbara Delinsky (audiobook)
Turtles all the Way Down by John Green
The Cure by Douglas E. Richards
The Dark is Rising by Susan Cooper
The Red Pyramid by Rick Riordan
The Girl He Used to Know by Tracey Garvis Graves (ARC)

I also wrote over 52,000 words this month, and I am a little bit tired!

I’ve included my review of my favorite ARC of the month below. You can click on the links here to see my reviews of the other two.
The First Conspiracy https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2580740007 

The Girl He Used to Know https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2604139127


I received an Advance Reader’s Copy of An Anonymous Girl by Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen from the publisher (St. Martin’s Press) in exchange for an honest review. An Anonymous Girl is scheduled for release on January 8, 2019.

I read The Wife Between Us last year and struggled with some plot and character issues. This made me a little hesitant to pick up another book by this duo. While An Anonymous Girl did have some minor issues for me, I was overall pleasantly surprised by the read.

This is the story of Jess. Jess is living on her own in New York City, working as a makeup artist for hire for a local company. On one of her jobs, Jess overhears an invitation to a psychological study and manages to get herself on the subject list in order to make some extra money. The study is digging into the topics of ethics and morality. These are the topics of the whole story. What would you be willing to do for personal gain? What would you have to gain to violate your personal ethics?

Jess gets pulled into the life of the doctor who is running the study, accepting more money than she could have dreamed possible. Just to answer some questions about her past. And then to put herself in real-life situations (or maybe they’re staged, Jess is unsure….).

The events of the story unfold in NYC. Because I have been to New York, I was able to see the story unfold in this city. If I hadn’t been there, however, I think the descriptions in the novel would have led me to envision as a much calmer, quieter city than it is in reality.

Where the chaos lived was in the plot and the characters. For the duration of the story, lies and deception prevail. Like the characters, you find yourself constantly questioning every move of every individual. There were spots in the story where I got so lost in the layers of lies that I was mostly sure something happened in the plot that contradicted a previous plot point. Because of all the lies and questions, however, I was never sure if the issue was in my memory or an actual plot issue.

What I am more sure of is my impression of the characters. I struggled a lot with the psychiatrist running the study. This character is written in a very precise way, with the chapters told from this point of view written in second person, which I think was intended to mimic clinical, scientific writing. This was a very difficult point of view for me to connect with. I struggled to connect the voice here with the actions the character was taking.

The biggest glitch for me was the final moments of the story. There is one last twist, literally on the last two pages of the novel. This twist felt very contradictory to the character. It seemed to undo the entire arc of the character in question, throwing them right back to where they started the story. This stood out a lot to me, as the character had made great strides in the preceding chapters.

Overall, An Anonymous Girl was a more enjoyable story for me than the previous one by this pair of authors. They are very good at putting together twist and turns, making the reader question what they are reading. I think this pair will get even better as they continue writing, delivering stories with seamlessly woven plots and hopefully characters who are entirely consistent.