Posts

, , , , ,

489. Watch Me Disappear

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:

Author:  Janelle Brown

Genre:   Fiction, Romance, Mystery, Thriller

358 pages, published July 11, 2017

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

Watch Me Disappear tells the story of Billie, Olive and Jonathan, a family that is torn apart when Mom Billie disappears while on a solo hiking trek and is presumed dead.  Olive and Jonathan are left to cope and wonder what happened.

Quotes 

“Who you want people to be makes you blind to who they really are.”

 

“You don’t realize how much you’ll miss the asphyxiating intimacy of early parenthood until you can finally breathe again.”

 

“All people are unknowable, no matter how close you may think you are. Of the millions of thoughts we all think every day, of the millions of experiences we have, how many do we allow other people to know about? A handful? And no one willingly shares their worst, do they? The flaws you see, those are like the very tip of an iceberg. So we’re all just poking around on the surface, trying to figure out the people we love with a kind of, I guess, naïve idealism.”

 

“Only someone fearful of his own ordinariness would buy, so unquestioningly, someone else’s extraordinariness. Maybe this is why they say love is blind: Who you want people to be makes you blind to who they really are.”

 

“You believe what you think you believe, until suddenly, you realize that you don’t anymore. Or maybe you do believe, but it’s no longer convenient to do so, so you decide to forget. You decide to find other beliefs, ones that more comfortably fit the constantly evolving puzzle of your life. To put it more finely: There are those beliefs that you will carry with you until the end of your days. A belief in friendliness; a belief in long vacations; a belief in the power of the press and the merits of good coffee. And then there are the beliefs that seem so vital when you are young, but that the passing years steadily leach out of you: a belief in not selling out; a belief in the superiority of the artist; a belief in hardwood floors and staying fit and your ability to change the world. Most of all: a belief that love is forever, that you can climb into a stranger’s heart and know that person and be known in return.”

 

“Take two people with a mutual willingness to connect, convince them to expose their innermost thoughts, and presto: true love.”

 

“Think about what a miracle it is that we’re all working in concert with one another. Every day humans get a fresh chance to decide whether we’re going to destroy each other or build a better world, and you know what? For the most part, we do the latter.”

 

“It didn’t seem fair, and then that love could fizzle,curdle, ossify into something less wonderful than what it once was. And then you were stuck, because, ultimately, love is a kind of trap. Once you find it, you can’t deviate from that commitment without everyone getting hurt. You can’t just leave. Instead, need wins out over freedom; and everyone stands around feeling wounded and bitter, letting inertia take over.”

 

My Take

I picked up Watch Me Disappear after reading and loving Janelle Brown’s taut, page turning thriller Pretty Things.  I didn’t enjoy Watch Me Disappear nearly as much and it took me a lot longer to finish than it should have, but it was still a decent read with some ideas to ponder.

/by
, , , , , ,

464. Pretty Things

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Lisa Stock

Author:  Janelle Brown

Genre:   Fiction, Romance, Mystery, Thriller, Suspense

496 pages, published April 21, 2020

Reading Format:  e-Book on Overdrive

Summary

Pretty Things tells the story of two very different women.  Nina is a grifter who grew up bouncing from town to town with her less than honorable single mother.  Vanessa is an heiress who has made a name for herself as a lifestyle Instagram celebrity.  Their worlds collide in Lake Tahoe where the two engage in a cat and mouse, table turning game of deceit and duplicity.

Quotes 

“Nothing is ever as pure as it seems at first glance; there is always something more complicated to be found when you peel back the unmarred surface of pretty things.”

 

“Perspective is, by nature, subjective. It’s impossible to climb inside someone else’s head, despite your best-or worst-intentions.”

 

“It’s easiest to judge from distance. That’s why the Internet has turned us all into armchair critics, experts at the cold dissection of gesture and syllable, sneering self-righteously from the safety of our screens. There, we can feel good about ourselves, validated that our flaws weren’t as bad as theirs, unchallenged in our superiority. Moral high ground is a pleasant place to preach, even if the view turns out to be rather limited in scope.”

 

“But I suppose that’s the point of it all, for Vanessa: To throw herself into the world she wants to inhibit in the hopes of forgetting the one in which she really lives. Who am I to say she’s wrong to try? We all build our own delusions and then live inside them, constructing walls to conveniently hide the things we don’t want to see. Maybe it means that we’re crazy, or maybe it means that we’re monsters, or maybe it’s just the world we live in now makes it so hard to separate truth from image from dream.”

 

“Anything you do in fury’s service feels justifiable; no matter how petty, how small, how nasty or cruel.”

 

“Caption-and-comment culture in all its brevity leaves out the middle ground, where most of life is found.”

 

“Social media feeds the narcissistic monster that lives within us all, I would think to myself. It feeds it and grows it until the beast takes over and you are left outside the frame, just looking at images of this creature, like everyone else in your feed, wondering what it is that you birthed and why it’s living the life you wish you had.”

 

“Maybe our greatest strength as human beings is also our greatest weakness, the need to love and be loved.”

 

“and that, in fact, for most people not born into privilege, the playing field is a steep incline and you are at the bottom with boulders tied to your ankles.”

 

“They say DNA is destiny. And probably this is true for those with gift coded in their genes: say, a rare beauty or intelligence, the ability to run a four minute mile or dunk a basketball, or perhaps just innate cunning or insatiable drive. But for the rest of the world, those born without some obvious greatness, it’s not your DNA that will get you ahead; it’s the life you were born into. The opportunities you were (or weren’t) handed on a silver platter. It’s your circumstances.”

 

“Smarts mean a lot in the world, but good looks even more.”

 

“I watch and I wait. I study what people have, and where they have it. It’s easy because they show me. Their social media accounts are like windows into their worlds that they’ve flung open, begging me to peer inside and take inventory.”

 

“In the end, we are all our mothers’ children, no matter how saintly or evil they might be; and the loss of their love is the earthquake that cracks your foundation forever. It’s permanent damage.”

 

“This is the great horror of life: that mistakes are forever, and cannot be undone. You can never truly go back, even if you want to retrace your steps and take another route. The path has already disappeared behind you.”

 

“There is no one path in life that is set before you, I’m starting to realize; no one is making your decisions for you.”

 

“When you’re documenting everything you do, you stop living life for yourself and start living it as a performance for others. You’re never in the actual moment, just the response to the moment.”

 

“Sex—it can be about love, yes. And it’s wonderful when it’s that, and God, baby, I hope that’s what you’ve found. But it’s also a tool. Men use it to prove a point to themselves, about their power to take what they want. You’re just the first rung on the ladder of their world domination. And when that’s the kind of sex you’re having—which is most of the time—you got to make sure that you’re using it as a tool, too. Don’t let yourself be used up by them, all the time believing it’s some kind of equal relationship. Make sure you’re getting just as much out of it as they are.”

 

“Was it any wonder that people on the wrong side of the glass would eventually decide to take a hammer and break it, reach through and take some of it for themselves?”

 

My Take

Pretty Things was a roller coaster thrill ride that I whipped through.  In the same vein as Gone Girl, Janelle Brown knows how to write a cliff hanging page turner.  I love getting caught up in a non-stop, well written thriller and thoroughly enjoyed the time I spent reading Pretty Things.

/by