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Before We Met Lucie Whitehouse

We immediately found ourselves comparing this book to other ones in a similar vein - Gone Girl, The Silent Wife, both of which we have recently read for Book Club

The Silent Wife in particular had a similar female lead - isolated, didn’t have a job (or played at having a job), supposedly intelligent but very naive in other respects. Neither of which I warmed to. There were also similar male leads – alpha males, rich, expecting to get things their way. A popular trait at the moment seems to be books that centralise pretty exclusively on a husband and wife which this one did(and yep you guessed - Gone Girl, The Silent Wife and Before I go to Sleep also did). As well as those similarities I also thought there was echos of Kiss Me First where internet/technology was key – Hannah would possibly never have found about Nick if it weren’t for the internet.

I find this happens with books. One book on a seemingly new concept is written, The Da Vinci code for example and then a surge of simlar books follow suit rearely being better than the first. One of our members suggested the World Wide recession is possibly affecting this particular cluster of books, even if on a subliminal level. The male is quite successful but has taken risks (The bar in Gone Girl) and as a result is under more pressure as his seemingly perfect relationship crumbles. I hadn’t picked up on it but when you think about it there is an argument for it.

The book was very on trend – People do now emigrate and live/work in foreign countries. As a result they do have relationships with foreign people or in this case with people who are also far away from home. When this happens the extra layer of protection from friends/family that you would have had is removed, as is the extra layer of insight into potential partners family/history. So you could understand to some extent why Hannah and Mark didn’t know much about each other’s past and how much they were relying on the other to be telling the truth.

Whilst we liked that point we thought it was obvious in places – Neesha getting fired was always going to happen, the tidy bedroom was always going to be Marks. It was also very convenient at times - Hannah just happened to park in the one place the police car couldn’t see her so that Nick could grab her and why on earth did Mark not just ring Hannah in the first place and say he had missed his flight instead of triggering the whole sequence of events! No story then I suppose.

I personally thought Whitehouse could have pushed further into Mark being creepy – what if the scrap book that he kept in his old bedroom had a picture of a woman that looked like Hannah so that Hannah or at least someone physically like her was always part of his plan? The group also reckoned he followed Hannah to the book shop that day they first met. Whitehouse could have hinted at this and made Mark seem even more cunning and calculated.

The book did seem like a book of 2 halves. Before Mark returned and afterwards. I preferred the first half as I thought the suspense was best at this point and Hannah’s naivety was at its least. One member asked at what point would we have stopped believing Mark? There was no clear cut answer but everyone’s general consensus was a lot sooner than Hannah!

I was disappointed by how quickly Mark stopped loving Hannah in the end. One minute he was begging her to forgive him, telling her everything he did was for her but then in an instant he had changed his mind was trying to strangle her. Someone commented on the fact that the end of the book seemed a bit rushed and I agreed. It was quite a short book and could have done with a chapter or so more fleshing out the end.

We gave it a 5. It was easy to read (good for round the pool if you’re lucky enough to be going) and I think if I hadn’t just read 2 books on a similar theme I possibly would have scored it higher.


Next Book Sweet Tooth Ian McEwan

Question of the month. I think with this book and with The Silent Wife I didn’t like the books as much because I didn’t sympathize with the main character. How important is it to you to like about the character you are reading about? Any good examples of characters you hated but loved reading?

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