Abigail Willard first spots her from the back of a New York cab: the spitting image of Abby herself at age twenty-two-right down to the silver platforms and raspberry coat she wore as a young artist with a taste for wildness. But the real Abby is now forty-six and married, with a corporate job and two kids. As the girl vanishes into a rainy night, Abby is left shaken. Was this merely a hallucinatory side effect of working-mom stress? A message of sorts, sent to remind her of passions and dreams tossed aside? Or something more dangerous?
As weeks go by, Abby continues to spot her double around her old New York haunts-and soon, despite her better instincts, Abby finds herself tailing her look-alike. She is dogged by a nagging suspicion that there is a deeper mystery to figure out, one rooted far in her past. All the while, Abby's life starts to slip from her control: her marriage hits major turbulence, her teenage son drifts into a radical movement that portends a dark coming era. When her elusive double presents her with a dangerous proposition, Abby must decide how much she values the life she's built, and how deeply she knows herself.
You Again is an audaciously constructed novel, an unboxing of memory, desire, and regret-and an electrifying portrait of a woman hurtling toward a key crossroads in her life, where a secret lies buried like an undetonated bomb.
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I saw myself last night. 1, ABBEY, JANUARY 7, 2015
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(@TitanBooks, 4 August 2020, 215 pages, ebook, copy from the publisher via # NetGalley and voluntarily reviewed)
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Oh boy, did this book floor me. The blurb made it sound like the kind of twisty turny thriller and I love. And it was. I love the way the book is structured, long chapters split into smaller vignettes narrated by Abbey and various neurologists and specialists looking into her experiences. The author drip feeds information in very small doses often will large gaps between revelations so for large chunks of the book, I had no idea what the truth was. Did Abbey really see a younger version of herself? Why? How? Is she hallucinating? If so, why? The sections narrated by Abbey certainly seem to be too different people so I found myself thinking some sort of clone or double was plausible. The extracts of reports from doctors only left me with more questions. I couldn't stop reading because I had so many questions and so much I wanted to understand. This is a totally original thriller. It's a corker.
