An Anonymous Girl by Greer Hendricks & Sarah Pekkanen
4 stars
“We all have reasons for our actions. Even if we hide the reason from those who think they know us best. Even if the reasons are so deeply buried we can’t recognize them ourselves.”
An Anonymous Girl follows Jessica Farris, a young freelance beauty makeup artist working in New York and struggling to make a living and keep secrets. One unlikely job opportunity arises when a girl she is working on for a job mentions her opportunity to make money for a survey at her university. Jessica takes this time to pose as her and enter the study. The study focuses on morality and ethics. At its core, the questions make Jessica feel exposed, but they also strike something within her—an obsession and an awareness that she didn’t have before. Dr. Shields is the woman behind the survey and she has taken an interest in Jessica. As Jessica begins to work for Dr. Shields outside of survey, the questions of morality go to questioning tasks that make Jessica feel used and degraded. Dr. Shields’ manipulative schemes have caught Jessica into a web and she has to understand how to outwit the spider before she finds herself eaten. I was so excited for this book. I had heard great things about this writing pair’s debut thriller and I couldn’t believe that the publisher was inviting me to read this novel. An Anonymous Girl is a fun thriller. It starts out incredibly strong and is steeped in intrigue as we walk through Jessica taking a morality survey as well as a second person POV that observes her and is very unsettling. The stakes are high at the beginning of this novel and they made me excited to turn the page. I had to know where this novel was going and what was going to happen next. I never lost that feeling throughout the novel. This is a page turner for sure. However, the first half of this novel feels different from the last half. I thought this was going to be a 5-star thriller based off of the first handful of chapters, but it’s not. Somewhere amidst all the revelations the storyline’s level of intrigue shifts from moral to drama. I love a good drama, so I’m not complaining, but I think many readers may feel a bit bereft and underwhelmed at where the story goes. I really enjoyed the story that Hendricks and Pekkanen set up. It was unputdownable and had an air of moral twistedness that appeals to my weird reading taste.
Whimsical Writing Scale: 4.25
“The project you have become engaged in is about to evolve from an academic exercise into a real-life exploration on morality and ethics, you are told.”
The main female character is Jessica. Jessica is an odd character. She seems really boring and normal at first and then all of a sudden, the morality survey reveals her to be a multi-layered human being who sleeps with men all the time, feels guilt over her sister with a traumatic brain disorder, and is supporting her sister’s bills without the knowledge of her family. She has a lot to offer as a thriller heroine and I really enjoyed following. I will admit that the longer I followed her the more annoying she became. A lot of her decisions towards the end were just plain dumb. She is not the best character, but I did enjoy following her and she made the story interesting.
Kick-Butt Heroine Scale: 4
The Villain- There are two potential villains here and it’s really a game of which one is eviler and has done more harm and manipulation. There is Dr. Shields and her husband, Thomas. Dr. Shields controls the study and Jessica. She is a well-inept manipulator and is quite cold. Her level of morality is skewed and definitely unsettling. Thomas is just as skewed, but is less of a manipulator and has intentions that the reader has to decipher. Are his intentions as good as he makes them out to be or is he a philander looking to manipulate all women? The plot is fast-paced, but I wanted more from this dynamic. I wasn’t unsatisfied, but the outcome felt cheap and kind of disgusting (I don’t mean Karin Slaughter disgusting. I mean just plain unethical and unfair to those who may have experienced suicide
.)
Villain Scale: 3.75
There aren’t a whole lot of characters in this thriller. It’s a very concise and claustrophobic cast. Jessica starts up a relationship with a chef and that was kind of fascinating, but didn’t really do anything for me and felt kind of silly as the story progressed. I did like Jessica’s female friendships and I wish that they would’ve been showcased more. Jessica became isolated very quickly and even after she saw everything unraveling, she stayed in solitude to work things out which seems dangerous and dumb. I did like her dynamic with her family a lot, but still I feel like something was missing. None of the side cast really stands on their own or is memorable. I really did like seeing the inclusion of traumatic injury into the story because it is rarely touched upon in media but does happen and I thought it was handled pretty well.
Character Scale: 3.5
Overall, An Anonymous Girl is a fun psychological thriller that left me on the edge of my seat and incited a desire to turn the page at rapid pace. I flew through this one and I think a strong-suit of the story is the pacing. It doesn’t lag severely and keeps a pretty even tone throughout even with the awkward transition between the story as it tries to become more cohesive. I think that this will be a hit with fans of the thriller genre; especially those who like morality studies and affair drama.
Plotastic Scale: 4.25
Cover Thoughts: I like the cover well-enough for a thriller. It isn’t amazing by any means.
Thank you, Netgalley and St. Martin’s Press, for providing me with a copy of this novel in exchange for an honest review.
4 stars
“We all have reasons for our actions. Even if we hide the reason from those who think they know us best. Even if the reasons are so deeply buried we can’t recognize them ourselves.”
An Anonymous Girl follows Jessica Farris, a young freelance beauty makeup artist working in New York and struggling to make a living and keep secrets. One unlikely job opportunity arises when a girl she is working on for a job mentions her opportunity to make money for a survey at her university. Jessica takes this time to pose as her and enter the study. The study focuses on morality and ethics. At its core, the questions make Jessica feel exposed, but they also strike something within her—an obsession and an awareness that she didn’t have before. Dr. Shields is the woman behind the survey and she has taken an interest in Jessica. As Jessica begins to work for Dr. Shields outside of survey, the questions of morality go to questioning tasks that make Jessica feel used and degraded. Dr. Shields’ manipulative schemes have caught Jessica into a web and she has to understand how to outwit the spider before she finds herself eaten. I was so excited for this book. I had heard great things about this writing pair’s debut thriller and I couldn’t believe that the publisher was inviting me to read this novel. An Anonymous Girl is a fun thriller. It starts out incredibly strong and is steeped in intrigue as we walk through Jessica taking a morality survey as well as a second person POV that observes her and is very unsettling. The stakes are high at the beginning of this novel and they made me excited to turn the page. I had to know where this novel was going and what was going to happen next. I never lost that feeling throughout the novel. This is a page turner for sure. However, the first half of this novel feels different from the last half. I thought this was going to be a 5-star thriller based off of the first handful of chapters, but it’s not. Somewhere amidst all the revelations the storyline’s level of intrigue shifts from moral to drama. I love a good drama, so I’m not complaining, but I think many readers may feel a bit bereft and underwhelmed at where the story goes. I really enjoyed the story that Hendricks and Pekkanen set up. It was unputdownable and had an air of moral twistedness that appeals to my weird reading taste.
Whimsical Writing Scale: 4.25
“The project you have become engaged in is about to evolve from an academic exercise into a real-life exploration on morality and ethics, you are told.”
The main female character is Jessica. Jessica is an odd character. She seems really boring and normal at first and then all of a sudden, the morality survey reveals her to be a multi-layered human being who sleeps with men all the time, feels guilt over her sister with a traumatic brain disorder, and is supporting her sister’s bills without the knowledge of her family. She has a lot to offer as a thriller heroine and I really enjoyed following. I will admit that the longer I followed her the more annoying she became. A lot of her decisions towards the end were just plain dumb. She is not the best character, but I did enjoy following her and she made the story interesting.
Kick-Butt Heroine Scale: 4
The Villain- There are two potential villains here and it’s really a game of which one is eviler and has done more harm and manipulation. There is Dr. Shields and her husband, Thomas. Dr. Shields controls the study and Jessica. She is a well-inept manipulator and is quite cold. Her level of morality is skewed and definitely unsettling. Thomas is just as skewed, but is less of a manipulator and has intentions that the reader has to decipher. Are his intentions as good as he makes them out to be or is he a philander looking to manipulate all women? The plot is fast-paced, but I wanted more from this dynamic. I wasn’t unsatisfied, but the outcome felt cheap and kind of disgusting (I don’t mean Karin Slaughter disgusting. I mean just plain unethical and unfair to those who may have experienced suicide
.)
Villain Scale: 3.75
There aren’t a whole lot of characters in this thriller. It’s a very concise and claustrophobic cast. Jessica starts up a relationship with a chef and that was kind of fascinating, but didn’t really do anything for me and felt kind of silly as the story progressed. I did like Jessica’s female friendships and I wish that they would’ve been showcased more. Jessica became isolated very quickly and even after she saw everything unraveling, she stayed in solitude to work things out which seems dangerous and dumb. I did like her dynamic with her family a lot, but still I feel like something was missing. None of the side cast really stands on their own or is memorable. I really did like seeing the inclusion of traumatic injury into the story because it is rarely touched upon in media but does happen and I thought it was handled pretty well.
Character Scale: 3.5
Overall, An Anonymous Girl is a fun psychological thriller that left me on the edge of my seat and incited a desire to turn the page at rapid pace. I flew through this one and I think a strong-suit of the story is the pacing. It doesn’t lag severely and keeps a pretty even tone throughout even with the awkward transition between the story as it tries to become more cohesive. I think that this will be a hit with fans of the thriller genre; especially those who like morality studies and affair drama.
Plotastic Scale: 4.25
Cover Thoughts: I like the cover well-enough for a thriller. It isn’t amazing by any means.
Thank you, Netgalley and St. Martin’s Press, for providing me with a copy of this novel in exchange for an honest review.
Have you read An Anonymous Girl or plan to? What are some thrillers that you are excited to read this year? Any 2019 releases that you need right now? Let me know down below in the comments!
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