Scan barcode
A review by saliysa
An Anonymous Girl by Greer Hendricks, Sarah Pekkanen
1.0
starting the new year off strong !
this story was pointless. i was EXPECTING a story that tackled themes of morality and the human tendencies toward right or wrong...but instead i got an utterly pointless story about literally nothing. not to mention the fact that this book reads as if it’s waiting to be adapted into a screenplay for a movie. it has that cheap, blockbuster-esque feel and i’m just tired. and just saying, if you have to resort to pointing out your thinly veiled symbolism at the end, know that you’ve failed.
some immediate issues i took with the “plot” slash “structure”
- first of all stop stop stop stop stop. assuming that dr shields is a male initially is not any indication of anything about anyone. it’s a cheap gotcha on the part of the authors. dr shields is a woman...so what, exactly ? it’s not like that’s necessarily commentary on something about society because the big reveal only amounted to a terrible scorned woman story staring an amy dunne wannabe.
- i was more interested in jessica’s theater background and the descriptions given about her makeup jobs than with the actual story.
- it was kinda gross that jessica not wanting a relationship is somehow signifying some deep psychological trouble. of course, we’re in a “thriller” novel “about” “psychology” so we know it will be, but on its own, the assertion sounds like petty pseudo-intellectualism, only there to give credit to lydia. dr shields can ~read~ people. yeah, so can my mom after she watches any show on the investigation discovery network. it could’ve just been that she doesn’t want a boyfriend guys !!!
- lydia is a very strange character, and not for any of the reasons the authors probably intended. dr shields is clearly bad at her job as a psychologist, and this is, again, not for obvious reasons: her knowledge of psychology seems to begin and end with psych 101 from college. or with high school ap psych. it’s cringy how she spouts out these basic experiments and ideas as if this is supposed to make her an authority in her craft, when any high achieving high school sophomore has the same knowledge. like, you don’t need a doctorate to discern even half of what dr shields explains. ultimately she just talks...weird. i suppose they were trying to give her this rigid, pedantic intelligence and it’s just cheap and boring and not as impressive as it FEELS like the authors want it to be. disappointing.
- lydia apparently has no friends and did not think to simply hire someone with her wads of cash to quickly and securely tempt her husband and find out what she needed to with immediate results. instead she devised this absolutely terrible, convoluted plan that fell through nearly instantly because of how poorly it was constructed.
- jessica’s idolization of shields is entirely incidental, and whatever hold shields had on her to do her bidding was evidently quite weak, because she ends up in doubt pretty quickly. thus, any further attempt to try and control her was silly and boring
- it actually angers me that jessica sleeps with thomas so late in the game. i won’t discuss how it’s a derived plot point. i won’t discuss how strange it is that “sleeping with people in committed relationships” is one of her hobbies. i think it makes absolutely no sense that jessica isn’t the one who assisted in thomas’ first indiscretion, the one that started this whole mess. the story could have followed as such: thomas sleeps with a makeup artist from a show he saw, he admits it immediately. lydia sets up a morality study, narrowing in on jessica as her target demographic (somehow she ensures jessica volunteers, pretense of her money problems still viable) in order to shame and psychologically torment her for what she’s done to her marriage. alternatively, they could have even taken lydia’s pragmatism to a whole new level and have her set up thomas to cheat in the first place ! because she’s an ambitious researcher who wants to study the science behind morality and betrayal. this could have been a story about a psychologist who would do ANYTHING to further her research, even destroy her marriage and the lives around her. but no, lydia’s not even writing the damn paper. it’s just disappointing that with all of this potential, we got an inconsequential story about a guy who cheats on his wife, and through a series of coincidences she proves that he cheats on her.
- april’s whole storyline is meaningless and trite. should’ve nixed that one, ladies.
- this book is too. long.
- also i found a typo in chapter forty-four...and i think that’s the truest travesty of all.
this story was pointless. i was EXPECTING a story that tackled themes of morality and the human tendencies toward right or wrong...but instead i got an utterly pointless story about literally nothing. not to mention the fact that this book reads as if it’s waiting to be adapted into a screenplay for a movie. it has that cheap, blockbuster-esque feel and i’m just tired. and just saying, if you have to resort to pointing out your thinly veiled symbolism at the end, know that you’ve failed.
some immediate issues i took with the “plot” slash “structure”
- first of all stop stop stop stop stop. assuming that dr shields is a male initially is not any indication of anything about anyone. it’s a cheap gotcha on the part of the authors. dr shields is a woman...so what, exactly ? it’s not like that’s necessarily commentary on something about society because the big reveal only amounted to a terrible scorned woman story staring an amy dunne wannabe.
- i was more interested in jessica’s theater background and the descriptions given about her makeup jobs than with the actual story.
- it was kinda gross that jessica not wanting a relationship is somehow signifying some deep psychological trouble. of course, we’re in a “thriller” novel “about” “psychology” so we know it will be, but on its own, the assertion sounds like petty pseudo-intellectualism, only there to give credit to lydia. dr shields can ~read~ people. yeah, so can my mom after she watches any show on the investigation discovery network. it could’ve just been that she doesn’t want a boyfriend guys !!!
- lydia is a very strange character, and not for any of the reasons the authors probably intended. dr shields is clearly bad at her job as a psychologist, and this is, again, not for obvious reasons: her knowledge of psychology seems to begin and end with psych 101 from college. or with high school ap psych. it’s cringy how she spouts out these basic experiments and ideas as if this is supposed to make her an authority in her craft, when any high achieving high school sophomore has the same knowledge. like, you don’t need a doctorate to discern even half of what dr shields explains. ultimately she just talks...weird. i suppose they were trying to give her this rigid, pedantic intelligence and it’s just cheap and boring and not as impressive as it FEELS like the authors want it to be. disappointing.
- lydia apparently has no friends and did not think to simply hire someone with her wads of cash to quickly and securely tempt her husband and find out what she needed to with immediate results. instead she devised this absolutely terrible, convoluted plan that fell through nearly instantly because of how poorly it was constructed.
- jessica’s idolization of shields is entirely incidental, and whatever hold shields had on her to do her bidding was evidently quite weak, because she ends up in doubt pretty quickly. thus, any further attempt to try and control her was silly and boring
- it actually angers me that jessica sleeps with thomas so late in the game. i won’t discuss how it’s a derived plot point. i won’t discuss how strange it is that “sleeping with people in committed relationships” is one of her hobbies. i think it makes absolutely no sense that jessica isn’t the one who assisted in thomas’ first indiscretion, the one that started this whole mess. the story could have followed as such: thomas sleeps with a makeup artist from a show he saw, he admits it immediately. lydia sets up a morality study, narrowing in on jessica as her target demographic (somehow she ensures jessica volunteers, pretense of her money problems still viable) in order to shame and psychologically torment her for what she’s done to her marriage. alternatively, they could have even taken lydia’s pragmatism to a whole new level and have her set up thomas to cheat in the first place ! because she’s an ambitious researcher who wants to study the science behind morality and betrayal. this could have been a story about a psychologist who would do ANYTHING to further her research, even destroy her marriage and the lives around her. but no, lydia’s not even writing the damn paper. it’s just disappointing that with all of this potential, we got an inconsequential story about a guy who cheats on his wife, and through a series of coincidences she proves that he cheats on her.
- april’s whole storyline is meaningless and trite. should’ve nixed that one, ladies.
- this book is too. long.
- also i found a typo in chapter forty-four...and i think that’s the truest travesty of all.