books by Janelle Brown | Seattle Book Mama

What if the Unabomber had had a daughter? Thriller writer Janelle Brown spins a fascinating, credible, and memorable story based on this idea. My thanks go to NetGalley and Random House for the invitation to read and review. This book is for sale now.

Jane Williams grows up in a remote mountain cabin with her father; her mother died many years ago, so it is just the two of them. Once in a rare while she is allowed to accompany him into town to visit the bookstore, maybe even get an ice cream cone, but otherwise, she is cut off from society. She has no friends, apart from a casual friendship with the bookstore owner’s daughter; she has no play dates, no television, no computer. She is homeschooled.

But every now and then, her father will wake her from a sound sleep in the middle of the night. They have to go! She grabs her bugout bag and goes through their established routine, escaping via the tunnels he has built beneath their cabin. Her heart pounds, her chest heaves…but hey, it turns out to be only a drill, after all.

Her father is a writer, composing political tracts that he sells in small, independent bookstores that carry zines. And so, for most of each day, he writes, she reads, and when the weather permits, she watches ants build hills, picks wildflowers, and leads the sort of bucolic life he has planned for her. But then, things change.

The story is told from Jane’s point of view; when Jane longs for even a photograph of her dead mother, anything at all to tell her about the other half of her beginnings, I feel it viscerally. Poor kid. But things are not necessarily as they appear, and as she grows to adulthood, Jane finds clues, small tidbits she’s not meant to find, and each morsel leaves her ravenous for more.

The story unfolds in the 1990s with occasional flashes of Jane’s childhood the decade before, so while it’s not historical fiction, it does have a retro vibe, one that Brown provides with absolute accuracy. We see small snatches of the events that took place in the U.S. during that time, but Brown is too good to rely on pop culture, so these are meted out sparingly, only when needed, never as a crutch.

This is a fun read, and it’s unlike anything I have seen written recently. I highly recommend it to fans of the genre.

Janelle Brown has written several successful novels, among them Watch Me Disappear and Pretty Things, both of which I read and reviewed; I rated both five stars. So I was greatly looking forward to I’ll Be You, anticipating the same sort of page turner I associate with this writer. Sadly, that’s not what I found. Though it has some nice moments, the pacing doesn’t measure up, and the whole thing is burdened with trite story elements and devices.

Nevertheless, my thanks go to Random House and Net Galley for the review copy. This book will be available to the public April 26, 2022.

The premise: Samantha and Elli are twins, and they grow up in Southern California as child actors, with the sort of rabid fan base that makes it hard to go out in public. Sam loves acting, but Elli doesn’t, and as they grow up, Elli leaves it all behind, attends college, then marries a successful career man and buys a home in the ‘burbs. They can’t have children of their own, but adopt Charlotte, who is now two.

Samantha discovers the horrible truth, that her skills were good enough when she was a child actor; twins are popular in the industry, because child labor laws prohibit any child from working more than half a day. Identical twins can each work a half day, and so filming can take place all day. Once she is grown and looking for a single, adult career, however, she finds roles hard to come by. The drug habit she’s developed as an adolescent burgeons into something larger, more horrible, and she’s been in and out of clinics ever since, sometimes on her sister’s dime.

Now Elli has taken off and left Charlotte with their mother, who is having trouble keeping up. Mom calls Sam, figuring that helping care for Charlotte is the very least that Sam owes their family. And Sam comes. Soon it becomes clear to Sam that Elli isn’t just off on a weekend retreat, but has been absorbed into a cult; in order to save her sister, she has to (yeah, this again) pretend to be her. Meanwhile, Mom is no help whatsoever, caught in a combination of denial and family roles, in which Elli is the good daughter, and Sam isn’t.

So we have here just about every overused element I’ve seen in the last ten years. We have the alcoholic addict that wants to drink but mustn’t, needs to use, but must resist. Over. And over. And then we have Bad Mama, a very popular mechanism of late. Mothers can rarely be good guys in today’s novels, and they’re (we’re,) such low-hanging fruit. As if that isn’t sufficient, we also have the twins-changing-roles trope, slightly modified. Even the name—Elli—can anybody out there write a novel, oh please, in which the protagonist is not Allie, or Alex, or Ellie, or some other variant on this same, eternal name?

I made it through the first forty percent or so withholding judgment, because I figured this author is one that can pull it out of the water and make it shine. But I realize this book is not up to snuff when I see how frequently I am setting it aside to read my other galleys. When I read the other two of Brown’s novels mentioned above, I started them, stuck with them to the exclusion of other books, finished them fast, and reviewed them. This time I would often consider opening it, and then decide on another book instead. Finally, I resolved to finish it, and so I did, but as you can see, I wasn’t impressed.

Brown is a capable novelist, and I’m not giving up on her. Anybody can have a dud someplace in their career. But as for this book, I advise you to read it cheap or free, if you read it at all.