Genre: Suspense/Thriller
Published: 2016
Pages: 340
2018 Adventures By The Page Worst Overall Book Winner
The Knox family has almost always been about gymnastics. Their daughter Devon is a prodigy, hopefully on her way to the Olympic team. Life doesn't really have time for anything else. Then a death rocks their community, and parents start asking questions. Who did it, and why? The parents must start asking questions about their own motivations, too. Is there anything they won't do to let Devon reach the top? This book follows the families of the local gym, particularly Katie Knox, as they struggle to find their own motivations and wonder if life can ever move on.
One thing that I do enjoy about books is getting to experience the lives of others that I don't know about. In this case, it was gymnasts. Still, the book focuses more on the suspense than worldbuilding. That would have worked better if there was action in most of the book.
In the words of Dwight Schrute, when it comes to mysterious storylines, the whodunit is "usually the person you most medium suspect." I've been into the suspense genre for a little while but by no means am I a star detective. I have very mixed feelings about this story, because it was exciting, predictable, and strange all at the same time. And Dwight's words rang true....the whodunit was who I most medium suspected. (Not because I wasn't sure who it was, but because in the story's world it would probably be who the authorities would medium suspect. I personally wasn't surprised.)
Besides the predictability, the writing wasn't that good. A few examples:
-It's much too descriptive, to the point of often trailing off or going on tangents. Sometimes it got so lost in description that I lost track of where the story was going.
-The author seems to make up her own odd phrases. I don't like when I have to reread pages because of over-the-top obscure language.
-Repetitive, repetitive, repetitive language. How many times do we hear Devon referred to as "extraordinary?" Among many other things.
-Fourth grade boys speaking in riddles. I hated how Drew's dialogue always implied something bigger. Kids don't talk like that!
-If the story centered around Devon, shouldn't we learn more about her? She falls kind of flat and I feel like there was a LOT more to her that just wasn't explored. She was an emotionless robot. Too boring, in fact...
It does have its good points. Just when I thought this book would go down the pits it grabbed my attention and became a page-turner for a while. (Sadly, though, that is the point when most readers will figure out what might have happened given the interaction between the characters.) Then it got slow again. I wanted to find out what happened, so I pulled through, but the interim was pretty dull when there wasn't any active conflict. The ending was also disappointing, especially because it's pretty easy to guess who was behind everything. But where it really fell flat was the lack of consequence. Their lives just move on, huh?
In short? Ehhhh. I don't think "You Will Know Me" deserves the heaps of praise it got. The storyline was interesting enough but the writing was just completely off-putting, some characters were flat, and the story itself could have been more developed. If you don't mind books that try for dark aesthetic, though, you might enjoy this one.
2.5 stars
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