Joined in 2023 
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Lisa Jewell completely missed an opportunity with this one, but instead decided to victim blame a 13-year-old who was groomed by a 40 year old and married her abuser. This heart-pounding, gripping thriller opens with two women celebrating their forty-fifth birthday at the same pub.
Jewell has a way of putting the reader in a position where you don’t really know whom you can trust. Could this be her next subject, she wonders: the story of two women who share the same birthday but whose lives could not be more different. but… there’s something about Josie… 🤔…something bizarre…she wears denim… ALL the time… heck her curtains are denim… look 👀. Michaelides takes a literary turn in his latest novel, employing an unreliable narrator, the structure of classical drama, and a self-conscious eye to dismantling the locked-room mystery.But the more Alix comes to know Josie and her past, the more she worries she's made a terrible mistake. We learn about Kate’s possibly stalling career and Leo’s plan to apply to acting schools against his mother’s wishes. Josie is curious to know more about Alix and looks her up on the internet and finds out that Alix is a popular podcaster known for sharing the stories of strong women who have overcome the odds to exact positive change in their lives. I adored being inside Josie’s head, and it wasn’t until I got to the very end that I realized that her head was actually broken. Josie is such a slippery character that she turns elusive, even more so when the story takes a major abrupt turn with the sub-plot about Nathan.
On their 45th birthdays, Josie Fair and Alix Summer meet at a pub and discover they were born not only on the same day, but in the same hospital. It’s a crime novel set in the Marvel universe, using the character of Jessica Jones who is a private investigator with superpowers. The first two-thirds of the book was gripping and I would have given that five stars, but the last bit was anti-climatic.It means she’s wrong, that everything, literally everything, about her is wrong and that she’s running out of time to make herself right. Lisa Jewell has been around the scene for a while now: this is her ELEVENTH thriller after making the transition from romance novels. The reader knows this isn’t going to end well, but when the inevitable twist came, I had to pick my jaw off the floor…it was brilliant. Alix is a podcaster of some renown, but now her series of podcasts has come to an end and she wants to start something a little different.
How does Lisa Jewell’s characterization lead us to think of Josie as just a little quirky or lonely—and ultimately harmless?Josie seems to be fixated on Alix and is curious about Alix’s marriage which is also somewhat troubled.
What were you excited to explore by including a podcast within the structure, as well as by having one of the narrators be a podcaster? Maybe it is because I have certain expectations from Jewell at this point, and the ending here didn't fit with them. Lisa is a New York Times and Sunday Times number one bestselling author who has been published worldwide in over twenty-five languages. Alix and Josie bump into each other for the first time in the bathroom of a local pub, coincidentally on the day they were both turning 45. As the story unfolds, the layers of Josie's character are peeled back, exposing the intricacies of "her very intriguing life story.
A very good concept which is executed well, plus an unpredictable plot that makes you think twice about everything. There are always clues being planted and red herrings craftily scattered throughout the narrative, giving it a kind of unreliability that is in keeping with the title.
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