I loved The Girl Before! I started in on a Saturday and had to finish it Sunday morning. I could barely put it down. This is a fantastic, intriguing thriller!
It's written in alternating voices, so that you start by getting introduced to Emma, and then you meet Jane. Each chapter goes back and forth between these characters and between time, so you see similar stories unfolding as the chapters go on. You can see how things are similar and how they're different in each story. You get to know these characters slowly, inch by inch, as they transform their lives from chaos to order. Under ordinary circumstances, they would never have met each other. But these are not ordinary circumstances.
Both women have been through a painful and difficult time. They both need a change in their lives. They both need a new place to live, and after looking at several bad apartments that seem to be all they can afford, they find out about One Folgate Street.
This house is an anomaly, an expertly crafted mix of clean architecture and technology. The Monkford Partnership offers it to renters for a low monthly rent in exchange for the ability to collect data from the tenant, as long as the tenant follows a long list of very specific rules. No children, no pets--that's not all that unusual. But they're also not allowed to leave anything on the floor. No leaving anything out in the bathroom. Everything must be put back in its proper place, at all times.
The women find out that they have to change everything about their lives, leave behind their possessions as well as their emotional baggage, in order to be in this house and to have a relationship with the men whose vision created it, architect Edward Monkford. But how much perfection can a person take without it taking their sanity? And how will the other people in their lives deal with Emma's and Jane's changes? What are the consequences for giving up so much for a house, or for a man? Will it drive them crazy or make them stronger?
Personally, I couldn't live such an austere life. Maybe that's why I found this story so fascinating. The psychology of these women, of their lives, of their relationships is a tangled web that you're untangling until the end of the book, where the surprises roll out, one after the other, until all the pieces fall into place. If you're like me, you like to guess early on where the ending will take you. I guessed, and I was wrong. But despite that, I really, genuinely enjoyed almost everything about this book. I highly recommend it. It's fantastic.
Galleys for The Girl Before were provided by the publisher through NetGalley.com.