Book Review: You Are Not Alone by Greer Hendricks & Sarah Pekkanen
As soon as I finished reading this book, I thought it would make a great movie and then I read the acknowledgements to find out Greer and Sarah’s first two books are already in the process of being made into films. These writers are really on a roll.
Shay Miller is an unremarkable woman. She lives in New York and has been temping since she lost her data analysis job as part of a downsizing. She likes her roommate but she’s less fond of his girlfriend so she heads out early on a Sunday morning to spend some time alone. Down in the subway, she just misses a train and is forced to wait on the platform for the next one with a dodgy guy and a woman in a pretty sundress. She moves in the direction of the woman, hoping for safety in numbers. But just as the next train is arriving, the woman turns to look at her, then throws herself in front of it.
Shay’s life is turned upside down. She tries to take comfort in the numbers – since she’s a data analyst, she researches suicides, the methods and the frequency – but she can’t bring herself to take the subway anymore. And because she can’t stand not knowing why it happened, she tries to find out more about the victim.
Amanda Evinger, a nurse, was the woman who threw herself in front of the train. Through flashbacks, we’re introduced to her and her close-knit group of friends. They seem like the kind of New York women everyone wants to be. Beautiful, successful, confident. But they’ve got a secret – they did something bad – and Amanda couldn’t cope with it anymore.
Shay finds out about a memorial being thrown for Amanda and goes to pay her respects. But when asked how she knew Amanda, she doesn’t want to say she didn’t know her – what kind of weirdo goes to the memorial of a woman she never knew? – and she doesn’t want to admit that she was the last person to see her alive. Thinking quickly, she sees the blown-up picture of Amanda with a cat and lies that they shared a veterinarian.
Sisters Cassandra and Jane Moore know Shay is lying as soon as she says it because the cat in the picture belongs to them and Amanda didn’t have any pets. They’re already on edge because of the secret and now they wonder if Shay knows it, too. In the days before her death, Amanda wasn’t herself. Did she confess what they’d done before taking her own life?
To find out, Cassandra, Jane and their friends invite Shay into their glamorous world, taking her out for drinks and helping her find a new apartment. They also get her a new job and set her up with the perfect man when she admits she’s just begun online dating. And all the while, they pump her for information. Shay’s initial lie turns into more lies to cover it up and the women are sure she’s onto them. So they decide to kill two birds with one stone and set Shay up to take the fall for what they did.
Shay has a touch of Eleanor Oliphant about her but it’s a more realistic portrait of loneliness in the modern age instead of the weirdo stereotype Eleanor was saddled with. It makes her the perfect target. And the story has a touch of The Girl on the Train about it as Shay involves herself in the lives of people she really should stay away from. The authors have taken all the best elements of a number of bestselling novels and come up with one of their own that is not too shabby.
The writing is flawless and stitched together so well that you wouldn’t ever suspect the book has two authors. Shay is a little naïve but it makes sense in the context. And the rest of the characters are built with enough complexity to keep them interesting yet realistic. But the book still lacks the one final element – the gut punch – that would make it a great story instead of just a good one.
In a word: more-ish.
4 stars
*First posted on Goodreads 8 March 2021
