Over the past three years, I have read and enjoyed Lisa Jewell’s books I Found You (2017), Watching You (2018), and The Family Upstairs (2019), so I was happy to receive a copy of this year’s Invisible Girl from Atria Books and NetGalley in exchange for my honest review. In a slow spot in my pandemic reading frenzy, I was hoping for one of those books…you know, the ones where if you are reading and someone interrupts, it is REALLY annoying, no matter how much you love that person? Yeah, one of those. Also, my rating of the books dropped each year, with a 5-star in 2017, 4 in 2018, and only 3 stars for 2019’s The Family Upstairs. I was definitely hoping the downward trend would not continue!

But TBH, I had a hard time getting into this one. Jewell is great at creating characters who are multi-faceted and sometimes quirky. In this story we have a lonely single guy named Owen who lives across the street from the Fours family, including Roan and Cate (a child psychologist and physiotherapist respectively) and their teenage daughter who thinks Owen is a creepy guy. One of Roan’s patients, a girl named Saffyre, disappears, and the last person to see her alive was Owen. So far, so good. But (and it could just be me) I really don’t understand the whole incel thing, although in May 2018, it became clearer for me after listening to episode #120 of the  podcast Reply All. This episode, described as “How a shy, queer Canadian woman accidentally invented one of the internet’s most toxic male communities,” evoked compassion and sadness as I listened to stories about what seemed to be the common characteristic of the incels:  loneliness. And, maybe just me, but I found myself not really caring that much about Owen.

But, I digress. I think perhaps my previously mentioned pandemic reading frenzy really needs to slow down so I can appreciate the books I’m reading. I just finished Kate Elizabeth Russell’s My Dark Vanessa, which is a harrowing story about the “relationship” between a fifteen-year-old boarding school student and her forty-five-year-old teacher. It was very well done, but I felt a bit worn out and didn’t really want to read details about Saffyre’s ordeal. Lisa Jewell fans, people who like a good family-secrets-meet-creepy-neighbor story, or anyone ready for a thriller with a plot that hasn’t been done a million times will enjoy this one. Four stars.