You - Caroline Kepnes Review

 "When a beautiful, aspiring writer strides into the East Village bookstore where Joe Goldberg works, he does what anyone would do: he Googles the name on her credit card.

There is only one Guinevere Beck in New York City. She has a public Facebook account and Tweets incessantly, telling Joe everything he needs to know: she is simply Beck to her friends, she went to Brown University, she lives on Bank Street, and she’ll be at a bar in Brooklyn tonight—the perfect place for a “chance” meeting.

As Joe invisibly and obsessively takes control of Beck’s life, he orchestrates a series of events to ensure Beck finds herself in his waiting arms. Moving from stalker to boyfriend, Joe transforms himself into Beck’s perfect man, all while quietly removing the obstacles that stand in their way—even if it means murder."

This was such a creepy, eye-opening book and I loved every bit of it! It follows Joe, who becomes infatuated with Guinevere Beck when she comes into his bookstore and he takes her name off her credit card and googles her. He manages to find out so much about her just from googling her and looking at her social media and his stalking begins there.

This is told from the perspective of the stalker, Joe and is also written towards the reader and uses “You” synonyms (hence the name I suppose!). This made the book so much creepier as it was actually addressed to you. This mixed with how easy it was for Joe to follow and find out Beck was doing just made this an overall creepy book. He manages to use her social media to track her and her whereabouts which she freely shares and also manages to find out a lot about her from social media which he uses to create contact with her. It really made me sit back and think about my social media and how much has been shared and made me wonder how easy it would be for someone to use my social media to potentially do what Joe did to Beck.

Everything that Joe did he justified including all the weird creepy stuff but it was justified in ways that made sense most of the time and you could actually understand why he was doing what he was doing even if you didn’t agree with him doing it. The twists that happened in the book were very believable and didn’t seem like they were chucked into the plot to try and keep the book going or keep the reader interested.

One of the things I loved about this was that at times, you actually felt sorry for the main character despite the fact that he was the creepy, perverted stalker of Beck. Beck wasn’t entirely likeable either which again was a surprise; because you follow Joe’s perspective and get an inside view of all the creepy perverted things he does to Beck (like watching her masturbate, stealing her underwear and following her around everywhere she went) I figured that I’d spend this entire story feeling sorry for Beck – I mean she is the one who’s been stalked and followed etc; but I found it really difficult to like her! She seemed so stuck up and pretentious and so much of the stuff she does to Joe actually makes you feel really really sorry for Joe and make her seem like a bitch! Because Joe has access to Beck’s entire life, we also get to see how she lives her life and it’s obvious that she is a selfish person who uses people for her own needs and then just leaves them high and dry when she’s done. And ultimately, this is one of the things that end up leading her towards Joe in the end when she has run out of people to use, she finally turns to Joe as he’s fooled her into thinking that he’s just a ‘normal’ guy.

I would definitely recommend this if you’re looking for a creepy “thriller” book to read – there is a second book “Hidden Bodies” however for looking at the reviews for second book, I’m not going to be picking it up – many of the reviews say that it’s very different to You and is no-where near as good so I think I’m going to stop here so as not to ruin it!