FINALLY!!! A really great twist!
Spoiler free gist: unreliable narrator (it’s in the title y’all); feminism; complicated relationships platonic and romantic; unlikeable characters. GREAT narrative!
Josie is a bit odd. Somewhere in her adolescence she felt grown…and stopped. She stuck herself there. Possible it’s because of her mother’s neglect. Possibly it’s her husband who is not only 27 years her senior, but who she started a relationship with at 15 years old (him at 42—**BARF!**). She has two daughters and a penchant for denim!
Alex is a Podcaster. She has two children, a daughter and son who happen to attend the same school Josie’s daughters had before they became adults.
Oh, and she and Josie have the same birthdate, same hospital and everything. They meet the night of their 45th birthdays at the same place they both are celebrating at.
I’ll try to keep as spoiler free as possible.
However, I do believe I may hint at the ending, and thus:
***SPOILERS***
S T O P R E A D I N G H E R E
This book is a great peak at not just the insanity anyone can carry, or how important the fables we learn are. Stop here cause yeah I’m going to spoil.
The plot feels like it’s going to obviously end up with Josie doing something along the “big bad things people do” such as “the murder”—and she does.
Orrrr does she? See what I loved most about this was the fact that it seems like she didn’t in the end but that it was in fact her daughter Roxy.
And yet: we know a couple of things about Josie that can leave us as readers in doubt about what the actual truth is. The bow is not neat in this wrap up—heck if we’re going with the gift wrapping idiom I feel as though it’s much more akin to The Office’s Christmas episode with Dirty Santa, where Creed has Jim and he gives him something he had in a plastic bag sitting in his trunk. It’s messy but it is complete.
Honestly: I rarely like open endings. If I were to give it a percentage I’d say 92% of the time I HATE THEM!!!
But Josie has the ability to be such a fully realized unreliable character, who is just this side of Amber Turd crazy you can’t help but wonder if in the last pages if she is in fact guilty, but just delusional enough to believe she didn’t.
Beware wolves in sheep’s clothing.
Beware the ram in wolves clothing.
And also:
Don’t be the one who cried “wolf” when there wasn’t one.
No one will no believe you after a while, and you will always be a guilty “basic bitch.”
5/5 Stars!!!
