windjamm | Book Review: Don't Let Her Stay

This was an interesting experiment for me. Largely, I enjoy checking out highly rated lists on goodreads, seeing what people have been enjoying this year. This time I felt like branching out, so I took a dip into mystery and I thought Don't Let Her Stay looked fairly promising. Something about how dire the title was and the overall premise of a step-mother meeting her estranged step-daughter for the first time and there being a big Mystery sounded good for a quick, 4hr read (at 2.0 speed on audio book).

If you don't want spoilers, let me just say that I decided not to finish this book and look up the ending because it only dragged, but prickled as it did and I decided there was probably nothing it could offer me that would make the next two and a half hours worthwhile. In Video Game Review, this was once called Wolpaw's Law, the point where a thing can no longer be redeemed by its ending regardless of how high the quality is. (Think of it as the point at which the final can no longer salvage your grade.)

Now, SPOILERS.

Joanne, the POV character, is insufferable. To be inside the mind of someone being gaslit and manipulated was always going to be difficult and I certainly wanted to sympathize with her. Likewise, I understand that the depths someone must go to in order to find peace in a world that is hostile necessitates a certain acceptance of the shattering of your personhood. Yes, of course she reconciled with her husband when he didn't deserve it because otherwise she'd live in a hostile space absolutely devoid of spaces where she recieves positivity or affection (twisted though it is).

However, the narrative swerves into a place that marries her mentally ill mother who was always paranoid to the self-doubt in such a way that it becomes plot critical that she accept the ugly love of this man she admires so much. And then it builds a backstory where she tried to make him jealous and he simply blew up and did not talk to her for the rest of the night, followed of course by the makeup and apology the next day (the pattern he uses any time he's angry herein).

And I don't blame the woman herself. If Joanne was a real woman I would feel so deeply for her and this sorry lot where no one she's ever met seems to like her very much. Indeed, it seems like her world in its entirety conforms to the worst version anyone with anxiety has imagined. That is to say, when she goes and starts trying to work from home every one of her co-workers seems to not only be hesitant about her return at face value, but be deeply irritated that she has a child or that she's going through something (that thing being believing that her step-daughter is trying to kill her baby). The fact that she's so isolated with no one to turn to and that almost every awful thing she thinks about her husband and step-daughter is true makes a truly miserable portrait to experience in a first person perspective.

It was just too much for me to have a reliable narrator who was being gaslit over and over again to posit that she wasn't actually reliable with a story that ultimately didn't feel surprising having read that the ending validated my earliest suspicion.

Ultimately? Didn't recommend this one.