Story for the Week
It is said that the first step in overcoming your addictions is admitting them. So here goes. “Hello, my name is Nancy, and I am a reality TV junkie.” 📺📺📺📺📺 Maybe “junkie” is too strong a word. I don’t watch Real Housewives or Big Brother or a multitude of others. A girl has to have some standards. 🤣
In all honesty, I’ve been intrigued by certain reality TV shows for a long time. The first one I remember being sucked in by was MTv’s Real World. For those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about, the premise of the series is seven strangers from different backgrounds who move into a house together. No challenges, no voting, no alliances. They just lived their lives all under one roof. I don’t know if it remained that way in later seasons because I stopped watching it a long time ago, but each episode used to begin with: “This is the true story of seven strangers picked to live in a house and have their lives taped to find out what happens when people stop being polite and start getting real.” I was in my 20s when Real World premiered in 1992, so I was smack dab in their target audience.
I have since become a fan of Survivor (haven’t missed an episode and currently binge watching all the old seasons with my daughter), The Amazing Race, Married at First Sight, and of course The Bachelor franchise. They are definitely escapism—TV shows that I don’t have to think about and that provide endless entertainment.
But what drew me to reality series to begin with was not the escapism. I was a psychology minor in college, and the class I found most interesting was Group Dynamics. To this day, I am completely fascinated by group dynamics. People are always on their best behavior when they first meet, so to quote the Real World introduction, “what happens when people stop being polite and start getting real?” What happens when they start showing their true colors and turn on one another? What happens, as it often does on Survivor, when people start manipulating situations and one another for a million-dollar payout? What would you do (or not do) for a big payday? THAT is what keeps me watching.
This book doesn’t have anything to do with reality TV, but group dynamics and manipulation by “leaders” of a group are running themes in this story by literary power couple Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen.
Book Review
⭐⭐⭐⭐
4 Stars for You Are Not Alone by Greer Hendricks & Sarah Pekkanen
344 pages
Publisher: St. Martin’s Press
Publication Date: March 3, 2020
I received an advance copy of this title from NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press in exchange for an honest review.
Publisher’s Description
Shay Miller wants to find love, but it eludes her. She wants to be fulfilled, but her job is a dead end. She wants to belong, but her life is increasingly lonely.
Until Shay meets the Moore sisters. Cassandra and Jane live a life of glamorous perfection, and always get what they desire. When they invite Shay into their circle, everything seems to get better.
Shay would die for them to like her.
She may have to.
************
Main Characters:
- Shay Miller – a data analyst in New York who sees a woman jump in front of a subway train and becomes obsessed with who she was, where she came from, and what happened to her because Shay is disenchanted with her own life.
- Amanda Evinger – a single woman who worked as an ER nurse, committed suicide by jumping in front of a subway train, witnessed by Shay.
- Cassandra & Jane Moore – sisters who own a PR firm, they have a close knit circle that included Amanda, but they are clearly concerned about what led up to Amanda’s suicide.
Trigger warning: suicide
In Hendricks and Pekkanen’s newest book, Shay Miller is a data analyst in New York who is finding herself increasingly more isolated as things in her life, one by one, seem to fall apart. She shares an apartment with her friend Sean (who she wishes was more than a friend), but he’s planning to move his girlfriend into the apartment he and Shay share. She lost her job, and she’s attempting but struggling to find a permanent job.
Then one Sunday morning as she waits for the subway, she sees a woman commit suicide by throwing herself in front of a train. Shay, who analyzes everything and keeps random statistics and notes in a “data book,” finds herself deeply impacted by the woman’s suicide. She relates to what she can only believe is this woman’s feeling of loneliness and despair. This sends her into a tailspin, and she needs to know more about the stranger and what drove her to kill herself.
I don’t want to give a lot away here. Part of the appeal of this book is the way the story builds with Shay seeking information about the woman who committed suicide and how she gets embroiled with the Moore sisters. The chapters alternate between Shay, Cassandra & Jane, and a variety of other characters. Shay’s chapters are in the first person and are very structured and analytical, like her. The rest of the chapters are in the third person, in the present day and in flashbacks, and give us insight into the other characters in the story.
True to their other books, Hendricks and Pekkanen know how to build a story and keep their audience reading. And I did not see the reveal in Part Three coming. That’s all I’ll say about that. You’ll just have to get there on your own.
The reason I knocked this down to four stars is that there were so many characters in Cassandra & Jane’s circle that I started to get confused, and three of them seemed kind of irrelevant. I know they build up some of the back story, but I found myself flipping back and forth to refresh my memory on who was whom. I also thought the varying timelines on the flashbacks added to the confusion, and Shay seems really naive and gullible for someone who has lived and worked in New York for a while.
Overall, though, this is an excellent read!
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