I have no idea why this book caught my eye; it's not my usual genre (psychological thriller), and it's a story that ostensibly about a woman but told from the POV of a man and written by a man, which I find really suspect at the best of times (which 2019 is, quite clearly, not). But I put it on hold at the library and then had a firm deadline once I got it, since there are a million holds on every copy of the book in the system and so it's impossible to renew it. That deadline meant that I did in fact make myself read it before it was due, and I'm really glad I did.
The setup is that there's a woman named Alicia Berenson who's a successful painter who murdered her husband, and then simply stopped talking. She's found not guilty by means of insanity (or whatever the equivalent legal situation is in the UK, which is where the story is set), and now lives in a mental hospital run by the state. Our POV character is Theo Faber, a psychologist who's obsessed with figuring her out: why did she stop talking? Why did she kill him? What did the self-portrait she painted after her husband was murdered mean? The narrative cuts back and forth between Alicia's journal entries in the month leading up to the murder, and Theo's POV as he uses progressively more dubious means to attempt to unravel who Alicia was before she murdered her husband, including visiting her relatives and the relatives of her dead husband. I knew that there was something I was missing, some connection that the narrative wasn't giving me quite enough information to put together, until suddenly it all hit at once. I didn't have the time to reread the book from the beginning, but I did think that much like Gone Girl, it's the sort of story that would read extremely differently the second time through. If this sounds remotely intriguing, I really recommend it.
Grade: A
The setup is that there's a woman named Alicia Berenson who's a successful painter who murdered her husband, and then simply stopped talking. She's found not guilty by means of insanity (or whatever the equivalent legal situation is in the UK, which is where the story is set), and now lives in a mental hospital run by the state. Our POV character is Theo Faber, a psychologist who's obsessed with figuring her out: why did she stop talking? Why did she kill him? What did the self-portrait she painted after her husband was murdered mean? The narrative cuts back and forth between Alicia's journal entries in the month leading up to the murder, and Theo's POV as he uses progressively more dubious means to attempt to unravel who Alicia was before she murdered her husband, including visiting her relatives and the relatives of her dead husband. I knew that there was something I was missing, some connection that the narrative wasn't giving me quite enough information to put together, until suddenly it all hit at once. I didn't have the time to reread the book from the beginning, but I did think that much like Gone Girl, it's the sort of story that would read extremely differently the second time through. If this sounds remotely intriguing, I really recommend it.
Grade: A
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