Blog Absence Again

Hi guys. I know I’ve been missing from many of your blogs the last few days and I wanted to say how sorry I am. Seasonal allergies have aggravated my migraines and I’m kind of getting my butt kicked at the moment.

So, I’ve been putting up some brief posts, and hopefully in the next few days I can start catching up with everyone. As usual, thanks for bearing with me. You all are the best and as a thank you I’m leaving you with this music video that always makes me smile.

 

Watch Me, by Jody Gehrman ~ 2.0 Stars

Tags

Adult Fiction, Psychological Suspense

Thanks to NetGalley and St. Martin’s Griffin for providing an eARC in exchange for an honest review.

Release Date: Available Now

320 Pages

Synopsis: Kate Youngblood is disappearing. Muddling through her late 30s as a creative writing professor at Blackwood College, she’s dangerously close to never being noticed again. The follow-up novel to her successful debut tanked. Her husband left her for a woman ten years younger. She’s always been bright, beautiful, independent and a little wild, but now her glow is starting to vanish. She’s heading into an age where her eyes are less blue, her charm worn out, and soon no one will ever truly look at her, want to know her, again.

Except one.

Sam Grist is Kate’s most promising student. An unflinching writer with razor-sharp clarity who gravitates towards dark themes and twisted plots, his raw talent is something Kate wants to nurture into literary success. But he’s not there solely to be the best writer. He’s been watching her. Wanting her. Working his way to her for years.

As Sam slowly makes his way into Kate’s life, they enter a deadly web of dangerous lies and forbidden desire. But how far will his fixation go? And how far will she allow it?

Watch Me is billed as a creepy psychological suspense story, but for me it came up short mainly because I found the two main characters for the most part empty and shallow. The chapters alternate between Kate and Sam so you get an excellent perspective of what’s going on in both of their heads. Unfortunately Kate had such a flat personality and made so many decisions that just didn’t make sense to me, that I just never connected to her. And Sam was an even bigger disappointment. I usually love it when I see a psychologically disturbed character’s first person perspective, but while Sam was definitely creepy, I wanted more darkness, more mayhem, more fireworks. I also think the plot definitely would have benefited from more revelations about his backstory, particularly in regards to his relationship to his mother.

In the end, I felt that although Watch Me had lots of potential, it didn’t quite live up to the exciting premise. The characters and plot were rather ho-hum and the ending left several plot holes unfilled. I have to be honest though and say that if you look on Goodreads it’s receiving mainly 4-5 star reviews. Perhaps this is a case of “It’s me, not you.”

Whimsical Wednesday ~ Tom Wolfe Edition

Tags

Tom Wolfe, Whimsical Wednesday

The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it.