The Girl He Used to Know - Tracey Garvis Graves (book review)

This is a book that I won in a give-away.  I think that the publisher is trying to create book buzz ahead of the publication date of April 2 - give away thousands of copies in exchange for a review.  Back in the day when I had a book blog, I would periodically receive books from authors, publishers, or publicists; but it has been a few years since a free book showed up in my mailbox.  (And with this book, I didn't get notification that I had won the give-away, and I had forgotten that I had entered - the book just magically appeared in my mailbox one day when I checked it on my way home from work!)

Anyways, it was a good book, but not a great book.  It is a second-chance love story that moves back and forth across a 10-year gap. Annika and Jonathan met in collage; made plans to move to New York City together after graduation; due to "circumstances," Jonathan goes and Annika stays behind; 10-years later they are both in Chicago and run into each other in a grocery store and re-connect.

I found the book pacing a bit uneven.  It was a fast and easy read that tended to pick up speed as it moved along, but in the first 100 pages or so I was tempted to stop reading because nothing was happening.

In terms of the characters, the book is written in first-person, alternating point-of-view, so normally I would expect to get to know both characters well; but I found that I got to know Annika well, but I hardly know Jonathan at all.  I don't know what he is thinking (beyond Annika is hot), or what he is feeling (beyond I don't want to lose Annika).  I also didn't find that there was strong chemistry drawing them together - we are told that they love each other, but aren't shown this.  Annika is neuro-divergant (yay for diverse characters), and Jonathan (for the most part) stands up for her when the world can be cruel to anything perceived as different; but two weeks after reading this book, the characters are shadowy blurs in my brain rather than living characters - I don't think that they are going to stick with me in the long-term.

The plot, on the other hand, picked up speed as it went along and this is the part of the book that is going to stick with me.  There is a massive plot-twist on p. 250 of a 291 page book that completely caught me off-guard and made the book for me.  It is the sort of plot-twist that had no foreshadowing, but is one that I should have anticipated.  And in order to say more, I'm going to put the next bit as a spoiler - if you want to be surprised as I was when I read it, you will want to skip to the bottom of this review.

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The two "eras" of the book are 1991 and August/September 2001.  The author even gives dates as the end of the book draws closer - Sept. 10, Sept. 11... but when Jonathan was in the Twin Towers when the airplanes hit, it caught me completely unprepared, and unable to put the book down until I finished it.  Like I said, not foreshadowed or hinted at in the plot, but I should have known.

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So... if I were to try and give this book a grade, it would probably be a middle-of-the-road grade like C+ or B-.  I didn't find the characters well defined, but the plot (especially that plot twist) have kept me thinking about this book after finishing.

Thank you, St. Martin's Press for the book; and thank you, Smart Bitches for hosting the give-away!