Holy shit I'm obsessed

This book really spoke to me.
We follow a female serial killer who kills men who very much deserve it btw but it's tortuous because you don't wanna root for her but you also kinda do?
We also follow the pov of the detective who is investigating the murders while also trying to prove her worth in a industry typically ran by men.
This is a book written for women who wanna gain their power back or who wanna be understood or even just heard.

There are so many powerful pages and quotes I have marked down and I am definitely getting my own copy when this becomes available.

Sorry if this review gives little details I'm trying not to ruin or spoil the book 😅

Thank you to the publisher for an early copy!

This is a beautifully written book about two women, a bartender and a cop. two almost friends, who live strongly in their bodies This is a book about the violence done to women daily by men. We watch Sophie the bartender kill her first man who has assaulted her and watch as her inner violence and reaction to the constant fear, anger and belittlement take over until that is all she becomes, the need to get even, to silence men. Nora is a cop who see the spirits of all the women who have been killed and is on case to find a serial killer of men Not an easy book to read but the images will stay with me 4.5

"I reached into my chest and found a lion there; I reached into my chest and set her free."

Whoa.

"You Know Her" is stellar - from the writing to the plot to everything. Totally could not put it down. Fascinating and, I'm afraid to admit, very relatable ("I've grown tired of being responsible for men." and "And there he was, in that scared peace, intruding."). I felt as though we spend more time with Sophie, or maybe it just seemed that way b/c her sections are so vivid, while Nora's brilliance is a little quieter. Such contrasts between their backgrounds and their experiences with men, yet in many ways, the same in the end. Loved both women equally, understanding how they could be drawn to each other, despite their opposition. And the ending, man, a gut punch. I get it, Sophie, I so get it.

P.S. Thanks to #netgalley for the ARC.

Sophie Braam lives in a small town somewhere in Virginia. This is the place where during winter, men mostly go to the bars and get drunk; in summer, there are tailgating parties revolving around beer and having a good time. For many men, having a good time means they can harass and insult women. Sophie knows it first hand – she is a bartender and has met her share of arrogant drunks sitting at the little Blue Bar. As the saying goes, it's all good until it isn't… Something in her breaks, and she doesn't want to accept it any longer. Sophie hates men, their false feeling of superiority, constant talking, and expecting women to listen and agree. Her first killing of a man is in self-defense after he tries to rape her, but she quickly moves to punish men in general. And so the psychopath in her emerges relatively quickly, and killings become a hunting game.

Nora Martin is a police officer who comes to a small Virginia town and tries to fit in with the all-men police department. She is an outsider, driven in her work by constant images of abused and killed women, the ones she couldn't help. Now the bodies of men are being discovered, some badly decomposed, and Nora is convinced that a woman serial killer is behind it.

"You Know Her" by Meagan Jennett is a dark, disturbing, psychological thriller, with a small town's claustrophobic atmosphere perfectly described. One can almost feel the wintery cold and the humid, summery air. The bar is also precisely pictured through Sophie's eyes, with details about making cocktails.

On the surface, Sophie looks like every other young woman; she is pretty, petite, with long dark hair. As the title says, "you know her." Her psychopathic personality is hidden; for example, no one knows that she is fascinated by the decay of the flesh. Observing the insects, she starts calling fruit flies her "sisters" – similarly to her, they destroy organic matter that is no longer needed. Likewise, Sophie doesn't see any reason for the existence of aggressive men. She becomes a praying mantis – without any sexual involvement with her victims – luring them and killing them.

Will she be finally caught and find her match in Nora? Or their female bond will be too strong to put them on opposite sites? Two women who are so different yet so alike propel this thriller, bursting at its seams with anger.

I really enjoyed this and was very impressed with the authors writing style and detail. Would recommend x

The term “literary Thriller” has been bouncing around a lot lately, but this book truly fits that description. The writing is lyrical and theatrical and metaphorical. It’s definitely a book that takes some brain power to get through- basically the opposite of a popcorn Thriller. It’s unique and twisty and kept me guessing. Definitely recommend

Thanks to NetGalley and Farrar, Straus and Giroux for sending me an ARC of You Know Her in exchange for an honest review.

Sophie Braam is a bartender at the Blue Bell restaurant in the rural town of Bellair, Virginia. She’s also a budding serial killer, murdering a series of men for reasons we’ll get to below. Officer Nora Martin is new to Bellair, and struggling to gain acceptance within the police department’s old boys’ club. Haunted by the ghosts of murdered women, Nora is drawn to Sophie. They each see in the other a kindred spirit, though Sophie is wary of Nora for obvious reasons, and Nora thinks something is just a bit off with Sophie. But what will happen if/when Nora puts the pieces together and figures out what Sophie truly is?

You Know Me is being positioned as a “crackling cat-and-mouse thriller.” Respectfully, I disagree. The story is far creepier than it is crackling, with an angry noir vibe that’s full of unsettling imagery of bugs, flies, and mites. In the first half of the novel, there’s almost no interaction between Sophie and Nora. And by luck or skill, there are so few clues for the police to follow that they’re not even sure that all of Sophie’s victims were murdered, let alone connected.

Instead, You Know Me should be read for its contrasting depictions of female rage. In Nora’s story, we get a third-person view of a put-upon woman trying to bottle up her frustrations and work within the system—in her marriage and in her professional life. It is completely realistic, but pales in comparison—deliberately, I assume—to Sophie’s first-person story. Sophie is an amazing character, part Amy Dunne from Gone Girl and part Hannibal Lecter. As a woman, but I think as a woman in the service industry specifically, Sophie has decided to take a different approach to #MeToo and #TimesUp by going on a murder spree of men:

“I want to punish men because they bore me, because they assume they own me, because they talk over me, grope me, catcall me, ignore me, poke at me, annoy me. Their voices, slithering up through the hidden places of my flesh, make me crawl.”
…
“And you, here in my heart, in my tale with me, don’t look away. How many times have you watched women scream? For fun, for ghost stories, podcasts, pornography, prime-time HBO? You gobble our pain down like candy, always hungry for the next handful, the next story, the more salacious the better. Well, now it was his turn.
Don’t you dare look away.”

You Know Me is a really sharply written book. Every scene from Sophie’s view just crackles with creepy menace. I just wish Nora had been given the same first-person presentation, and more opportunity to interact with Sophie. 3.5 stars rounded up to 4. Recommended.

Have you heard about a specific subgenre called "feminist thriller"?
In a broadest sense possible it's a novel that deals with issues of being a woman in a society through the prism thriller setting. First time I heard about this I thought to myself: "Well, how is this new, we used to file that under social critique." As the talented Nora Murphy writes: "It is by no means a new sub-genre in a rich array of thrillers and domestic suspense books, but perhaps its use as a classifier is relatively new. "
As I started reading You Know Her it actually crossed my mind how perfectly it fits this category. The onus of the novel is definitely not on murders nor the killer. It's right there, in the title, because you do know her, you know some of her thoughts, you understand her anger and frustrations and that's the point.
Her in questions is, for the bigger part of the novel, Sophie, a bartender who murdered a male customer on a New Year's eve. The other character is Nora, a young police officer who's investigating seemingly unrelated murders in little town of Bellair.
Told in alternating chapters between two points of view, the novel covers a period of almost a year since Sophie killed for the first time. In its essence her character is there to depict female anger in its crudest and unfiltered way possible and I have to applaud Jennett for really going there. Sophie's thoughts are not only righteous, they are also ugly and petty and all the shades in between. She was not written to be liked nor justified. Her chapters are told from first person point of view exactly because author wanted to make a point that this is something that was brewing inside of her for a long time, no matter how sudden it appears to others. Nora, in her mostly male oriented place of work suffers some of the same things Sophie does in her place of business and this is something they understand in each other, so she sees her for real. Nora has this tingling feeling about the murders because it was only Nora who could.
Their experiences are mirroring each other in so many things, but Sophie escalating led to their paths diverging more and more. It's most noticeable in Sophie's thoughts as well, because the more we progress the less connected you feel to her and I liked how we went from Sophie using her motive to justify the first murder, but then every new murder she's using to justify her motive, making it broader, more encompassing. She feels more and more in love with this new Sophie, losing her grip on reality.
I loved what this novel had to say... for the bigger part. Sophie's voice in the opening chapters, when she still doesn't go over the edge are the best part of the novel and the part that resonates the strongest.

My story begins as it so often has: I was ignoring a man at a bar.

I felt immediate connection to her, but the more I read the more verbose it was, sounding artistic for the sake of being artistic, losing its sharpness and perhaps, its focus. That's why I wrote earlier that Sophie feels more and more in love with this new person she became and this shift made me wonder whether author actually fell in love with how it all sounds, how profound it was if you think on it, if you ruminate on Charybdis, Persephone, Psyche comparison. The ending particularly felt flatter than I would like considering the set-up because it robed us of Nora's thoughts who, up to that point was mirroring both Sophie and reader in whole that "You Know Her" thing, so it doesn't feel like ending at all.
All in all, I liked this debut from Meagan Jennett despite its flaws. The things I liked, I liked so much it left a stronger impression than the things I didn't enjoy as much.

Such a great book! Highly recommend it to anyone and I look forward to reading more by this author! A must read!

The story line of this, female serial killer, is fantastic. I liked the premise and actually liked Nora the best.

What didn’t work for me and I think it was just too many elements that didn’t get fleshed out. Nora seeing dead people, could have been her own book. Random chapter titles that sort of for a minute implied that maybe Sophie was embodying female deity.

Definitely worth reading, just a few things that annoyed my writer brain.

This book was a fun read! It definitely was not what I expected, in a great disturbing way! If you love authors that can use their words to put the feeling of dread in your bones, this is for you. I have not read a story in a long time that was so wordy with literary techniques that can just draw you in. The only qualms I have is that the ending felt a bit rushed, I would have loved to see more of a relationship between Nora and Sophie before the ending. While totally disturbing in the best way, I am not the biggest fan of the lack of dialogue between the main characters. Otherwise, this was a great book and I can’t wait to see what the author does next!

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for an honest review. 5 stars for DNF as I cannot comment on the overall quality of the book.

If you like turgid prose with tons of similes (think Stacey Willingham, Ashley Winstead, etc) then you will enjoy this book. No doubt.

If you, like myself, lean toward sparse prose and tighter sentence structure, give this a pass.

This is a pitch-black literary thriller with echoes of the old Brad Pitt/Morgan Freeman movie, SEVEN. Dark and told through blistering yet poetic prose, this cat-and-mouse tale features two indelible female characters. Sophie, a bartender, and Nora, a cop. The lives of the two women become intertwined, as they grow into an almost-friendship, due in large part to their shared understanding of being marginalized and worse as women. One problem, though. Sophie has developed a taste for blood, men's blood in particular, and Nora is struggling to find the culprit in a string of recent disappearances and killings. While Nora's cop peers search for likely answers, she is convinced in her gut that the killer is a woman. And that the disappeared will never return. Long, descriptive passages sometimes take away the momentum of the story, but ultimately that wave is worth the ride. The ending is a gut punch. Meagan Jennett is a name to know. Looking forward to what she produces next. Highly recommended.

DNF.
This just wasn't my style, but others might enjoy it. It has very descriptive prose and wordy internal dialogue. More literary than I like and I was distracted by the all the ramblings. Jennett is a very talented writer, but it just wasn't for me and I couldn't get into it.

3.5 stars.

This review is going to be a little tougher to write then most of mine. This one was compared to "Killing Eve meets Sharp Objects" which put my interest meter in overdrive. I do fancy female assassins/serial killers/all around badasses so I tried to get this one as fast as I could.

It stars Sophie Braam, a bartender who gets a little fed up with certain men so she does what any psychopath does..... She starts killing them. And of course she starts to catch the eye of a certain police officer: Noah Martin and thus begins a Killing Eve type relationship.

Awesome right? Before I start this part I need to fully disclose that my attention span is about the size of what was I talking about just now? I grew up on two minute punk songs and Ritalin. So this book was really hard for me to read. Long Paragraphs. Tedious descriptive prose. Though processes in overdrive. Just when it starts to get going it will start rambling.

So........ On the whole this is a good book. The cat and mouse between Spohia and Noah is great and it's a solid serial killer / procedural book. There are a ton of people who will love it and if you aren't distracted by hyper descriptive prose then I say go for it. I just never could get fully into it.

I really appreciate Farrar, Straus and Giroux, MCD for giving me the opportunity to review this book and it has a publication date of April 4, 2023.

Advance Reader Copy given free for honest review.

You Know Her by Meagan Jennett was a crazy and compelling story that I simply could not put it down until I read the last page.
There were twists and crazy turns throughout.
A well written plot and story that had me engaged from the start.
The suspense and intrigue were phenomenal.
It definitely kept me on my toes. And flipping the Kindle page's pretty quickly.
I thought that the plot was great as usual. She knows when ramp it up.
The writing style was excellent and the pace was great, it was full of suspense and twists and turns.

"I received a complimentary copy of this book. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own."

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, MCD
Thank You for your generosity and gifting me a copy of this eARC!

The absolute protagonists are two strong women, one a murderer and the other a cop, both despised and underestimated by men.
The book is an interesting thriller but for my taste sometimes gets lost in internal dialogues and ramblings of the characters that detract from its agility. Although it kept my interest, I also had moments when I felt disconnected from the narrative.

Mystery and intrigue…secrets…murder…what will happen next? This book was sent to me electronically by Netgalley for review. It is frightening and real. The characters are not likable. The story moves slowly at times. The author is talented at writing a scary mystery. At times, this book reads like a true crime thriller. Innovative…

You do know her!
The title of this book refers to a cat and mouse game and the fact that the killer and the policewoman chasing her actually come into contact with one another - more than once. The publisher synopsis and the rest of this review shares some key points of the novel - you may want to stop reading and buy the book first!

You Know Her --the title also doubles as a warning - you DO know her. She is every female bartender, waitress, teacher, real estate agent, mother, person running/walking/shopping. The her in this book is a female who has reached the breaking point of her treatment as less and lesser in all facets of society. One day, one small thing is one thing too many. This fast paced thriller contains multitudes of the indignities of what women deal with on a daily basis just trying to survive the day.

Is it any wonder that Sophie broke?

Jennett sweeps you into a whirlwind of a story. I simply could not put it down, and I think I will read it again! If you love a fast paced, intelligent thriller, a heroine(s) that is complicated and flawed this is book for
you! #farrarstraus&Giroux