Cannonball Read 18

Sticking It to Cancer One Book at a Time

Irredeemable First Person

You by Caroline Kepnes

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Bingo: Map. Obsessive narrator maps every detail of his stalkee’s life. Have you ever read a book so awful it actually made you angry? Such is Caroline Kepnes’s You for me. The plot is easily summed up: a deranged bookstore worker fixates on a customer, getting more and more obsessed so that he commits multiple murders. He follows her, he accesses her email, he is a peeping tom, he sexually obsesses in repulsive fashion. The narrator is absolutely repugnant. The murders are the least of […]

You First by Caroline Kepnes

You First by Caroline Kepnes

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Please note that I received this via NetGalley. This did not affect my rating or review. There was zero need for this book. I have zero idea why it was written unless Caroline Kepnes wanted to really write about Sex and the City. All this book does is make you hate Joe some more. There’s no special insight into him at all at the age of 17. He’s still insane and falls in love with someone and does whatever it takes to keep them away […]

The Never Tell Collection

The Ghost Writer by Loreth Anne White

The Other Side of the Road by Andrea Bartz

Scorpions by Rachel Howzell Hall

Everywhere You Look by Liv Constantine

The Bad Friend by Caroline Kepnes

Jackrabbit Skin by Ivy Pochoda

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OK this whole Amazon Kindle and Audible collection is called “Never Tell”. It’s supposed to be about secrets, lies, and mind games. Sounds intriguing, right? Well some of these six stories were really good – like five stars good. And some of them were “but why?” mediocre. Like “I guess this story had to be told, but why?” I’ll rank them in order from five stars to “but why” (according to me of course). Grace Logan, a successful ghostwriter is lured in by a new […]

Bodies? Bodies!

Hidden Bodies by Caroline Kepnes

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Read this as part of CBR14 Bingo: Bodies. Because it has “bodies” in the title and involves a lot of bodies, some alive, some dead.  You was by far one of the best books I read this year. Which surprised me given that I don’t care for books about serial killers; finding them monotonous and often gratuitously violent. Everyone is trying to rip off Hannibal Lecter these days (and has been for the last thirty years). But Caroline Kepnes has crafted a you-niquely (see what I did there? […]

Bodied

You by Caroline Kepnes

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Kind of like my review for 2666, this is going to be one where I have to sort of list my uncategorized scattered thoughts. I sat on this for 24 hours and I still don’t know the best way to talk about this book so here it goes… -It took me four tries to read this. Why couldn’t I quit? My wife hate-watches the series. I walked in on her during a viewing and caught maybe fifteen minutes of it. It really helped me to understand […]

You Love Me – Caroline Kepnes (2021)

You Love Me by Caroline Kepnes

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Joe from You is probably the closest we get to Amy Dunne in millennial male form, and even though he’s a serial killer, he’s a fun character to have and share books with. It’s not a perfect closing to these books (I am not entirely clear we’re done here, but it ends in a most satisfying way), but I think we’ve covered quite a bit of territory skewering white liberal alternative space pretty well. We started with East Coast intelligentsia, moved to Hollywood, and now […]



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