When Alice was just a little girl she was attacked by twins who were trying to please “Mister Tender.” While Mister Tender’s Girl flat out states in the blurb that it was inspired by the true events surrounding a brutal stabbing of a young girl by two classmates who claim they did it in the name of the “Slender Man” – the character of Mister Tender reminded me less of the Slender Man and more of Lloyd from The Shining (if you don't know who that is, we may have to reevaluate our friendship) combined with Leland Gaunt from Needful Things as Mister Tender was a comic book …. errr excuse me graphic novel creation of Alice’s (the stabbing victim) father in the form of a friendly neighborhood bartender who could give you anything your heart desired – as long as you performed whatever task he requested of you in return.

Years have passed, Alice is now grown and moved across the pond to the States, owner of a coffeehouse as well as her own home and has done everything possible to escape her personal history – until a package arrives that won’t allow her to keep ignoring it.

I will attempt to avoid spoiling things here, but you do need to be forewarned that this sucker goes off the rails pretty darn quickly into unbelievable territory. And Alice???? Baby does some bad bad things. If you can check reality at the door you might find this to be a pretty stabby fun time. 3.5 Stars for me, but rounded down because apparently even some things are too ridiculous for me to accept.

ARC received about 114 years ago from NetGalley that I just now got around to reading since I suck. Thanks NetGalley!

Not knowing anything much about the title or the author going into this book I have to say I was pleasantly surprised with what I can away with. Th characters were good, the story was good, the pacing was just right. Would absolutely recommend this book to any of of this genre.

Interesting thriller based loosely on the Slender-man attempted murder. The heroine was not particularly likable but the story held my attention and took some unexpected turns.

"But if you listen to him too carefully, Mister Tender will pull you in, and from that there is no escape. He’ll give you advice, usually just the exact words you need in the time of your greatest desperation, but there is always a price for his wisdom. And that price is usually for you to hurt someone. Someone innocent."

I received a free e-ARC through NetGalley from the publishers at Sourcebooks Landmark. I have a fascination with the Slender Man mythology, even though I was a little too old to really be affected by it. (We had Bloody Mary when I was growing up?) I love the idea that urban legends can now originate online and take on a life of their own though, and I was immediately captured by the premise of Mister Tender’s Girl. Trigger warnings: violence, death, gore, anxiety, mental illness.

When she was fourteen, Alice was stabbed nearly to death by two teenagers hoping to satisfy Mister Tender, a demonic fictional bartender invented by her father for a series of popular graphic novels. Everything in Alice’s life is affected by that night. Now, over a decade later, she runs a successful coffee shop in Manchester and battles anxiety attacks by night. Her father is dead, ironically enough stabbed to death years ago in a different attack, and her brother battles mental illness under the care of an oppressive mother. When Alice receives a creepy package in the mail, she discovers a message board where obsessive fans track her every move, and one of them may have a more sinister agenda. Mister Tender’s Girl is loosely inspired by the Slender Man trials, where two young girls stabbed their friend as a sacrifice to a fictional horror character.

I seem to be in the minority of people who didn’t love this book, and I think it’s a genre issue more than anything. I have a lukewarm relationship with thrillers. I’m a horror fan, so thrillers rarely make an impact, and this is by no means a horror novel. There are plenty of tense scenes where Alice is stalked, attacked, or held hostage, but I must be terribly desensitized by media violence because it rarely made an impact on me. It’s well-paced in that interesting, somewhat out-of-the-realm of possibility way that thrillers have. Once the main characters are committing murders and covering them up, my willingness to believe takes a hit. I don’t mind over the top storylines, but thrillers have a tendency to carry on as though there aren’t any repercussions to these things, while still firmly insisting that all this could reasonably happen. Horror seems not to make such claims to supposed realism.

That’s not to say that there aren’t some very creepy moments in Mister Tender’s Girl. I’m fascinated by the character of Mister Tender who, while fictional, is plenty terrifying. He’s a sweet-talking demon who gets people to confess their greatest desires and then do terrible things for them. Uh, I would probably read those graphic novels and be a little obsessed with them too. The downside is that he’s, well, not real, and therefore rarely features in the actual story. The horror lover in me would have preferred a story about Mister Tender, not about Alice.

Alice is a little odd as a main character. I don’t have a lot of strong feelings about her, but we get to know her quite well over the course of the novel. She’s a strange mix of physical competence (she’s well-versed in self-defense) and crippling anxiety. She suffers a little bit from being written from a male perspective. She has a lot of random men approach her, but any introvert can tell you that if you keep your head down and don’t make eye contact, most people won’t try to talk to you. This doesn’t work on the overzealous (or the insane), and it definitely doesn’t work if you’re trying to be friendly (since friendly is almost always misinterpreted as interest), but Alice isn’t friendly. I don’t know. I’ve gone my entire life without having to attack a guy in the gym for trying to come onto me. Her relationships with her mother and brother are complex and, at times, destructive though, and seeing that subplot play out was one of my favorite aspects of the book.

The writing tends toward short, staccato sentences, but for the most part it’s effective and doesn’t shirk on detail. The novel proposes to examine the ways that art can have significant consequences on real life, which is a compelling angle, but I never felt like Carter was doing enough with this idea. Since Alice’s attack is all in the past, there’s little opportunity to explore her attackers’ minds or motivations. I didn’t care for the direction he took with her stalker, since it ends up being much less an issue of fiction influencing reality than what you might find in any number of other thrillers. Ultimately, I felt like he took a fascinating idea and shaped it into something much less interesting. The fact that he took a horror concept and wrote a thriller out of it is much more my issue than the book’s though, and I can see it being a hit for fans of the genre.

I review regularly at brightbeautifulthings.tumblr.com.

Loosely based on the Slenderman story, this book gives you the creeps as you try to figure out how a drawn image can have so much influence on people. As you continue to check around for a stalker that is watching your every move, you are also trying to determine who it is and how they know so much about a past that you have kept hidden for years.

I loved this book. I was equal parts creeped out and intrigued. I would put the book down to take a breathe and immediately would want to keep reading it. I have finished it a few days ago now and I can’t stop thinking about it and recommending it to those who love the horror genre.

How far would you be willing to go to get what you wanted in life? Mister Tender's Girl is a fast paced psychological mystery that will have you staying up late nights to turn the pages. When Alice was 14 she was stabbed by set of crazed twins obsessed with a comic book character, Mister Tender. What's even weirder is that Mister Tender was created by Alice's own father. Decades later, Alice has tried to re build her life in another country but it still tortured and haunted by the past. Panic attacks and self medication have driven Alice to a life of isolation, where no one really knows her true identity besides her enmeshed mother and heavily medicated brother. When a copy of unfinished drawings show up that are so similar to her deceased father's work, Alice begins to wonder who is out there that could be following her every move. Watching her. Stalking her. Be prepared to dive into this twisted story which has you wondering who is after Alice up until the very end. What secrets lie behind the brutal stabbing and can Alice ever live a happy life free of her demons. I really enjoyed this read that kept me guessing until the last page.

I read a first reads of this on Bookish and then received a copy via NetGalley for my honest review.

I love a good thriller and this one was that. It kept me turning pages until the wee hours. I loved that it was based on a true event. I started it one day and finished it the next morning. I love a book that keeps me on edge even though it’s not good for letting me sleep.
It was an excellent read.

Mister Tenders Girl quickly became the book I couldn't sit down long enough because I needed to know what happened next!

I was constantly trying to figure out who could be doing what and this story kept me on the edge of my seat and I LOVED EVERY SINGLE PAGE!

This is definitely a book that will be a favorite for this year and years to come! I am hoping that Carter sees how much this book was loved and will possibly write a sequel!

Thrilling, fast paced, mysterious. Those are the words to describe this novel! I was enthralled from beginning to end!

The internet contains a lot of shadowy entities that can endanger privacy and encourage dangerous acts while allowing anonymity to the perpetrators. Author Carter Wilson has utilized a real life case, in which two teen aged Wisconsin girls stabbed a classmate nineteen times as a sacrificial offering to an internet character known as the Slender Man, and has created its equivalent in the chilling psychological thriller MR. TENDERS GIRL.

Wilson wields words like a sword, as he slices through Alice Gray’s life with dark secrets being revealed at every turn as meticulously draws us into a thrill ride of fear and obsession. Alice is a Manchester, New Hampshire coffee shop owner. Now in her mid 20’s, she is a deep well of conflicting emotions when it comes to her perpetually ailing brother Thomas, her relentlessly coercive mother and the panic attacks and isolation she has suffered in the aftermath of the stabbing that almost ended her life at the age of 14 while the family was living in London.

Her attacker’s actions were motivated by Mr. Tender, the bartender in a graphic novel created by her deceased father. Another character he created specifically for his young children was a penguin named Ferdinand whose message to Alice and her brother was summed up in three words “NEVER TRUST ANYONE”.

Riveting from first page to last, Wilson’s skillfully unfurls his narrative by populating the story with a divergent cast of characters, some appealing, some unsavory and others pure evil coupled with unexpected circumstances that heightens the reader’s tension as he builds to a grim and surprising conclusion. This is a crackerjack thriller with a high-voltage creep factor!

“If you get the sudden urge to start trusting someone, be smart and do away with it.” That is the moral of the stories that Alice’s father wove into his bedtime stories he made up for her and her brother Thomas. When she was fourteen, Alice learned how dangerous trust can be when two school friends, the Glassin twins, stabbed her eight times while walking her home. They claimed they were acting at the direction of Mister Tender, the famed bartender in a graphic novel that persuaded people to do awful things. The worst thing, though, is Mister Tender was her father’s creation, a character from those bedtime stories.

Any resemblance to the Slender Man true crime is completely intentional. Carter Wilson read the first three paragraphs of a news story about the Slender Man case, was intrigued by the idea enough to stop reading and avoid learning any more so his imagination could weave something new from that slender thread. He wondered what it must be like to survive such trauma.

The story picks up fourteen years after the attack. Alice mother quickly divorced her father and fled to America with Alice and her brother. Her father was blamed, irrationally, for the attack because he created the character. Alice also changed her name to avoid the morbid curiosity of strangers. She owns a coffee shop and except for frequent, debilitating anxiety attacks, a low-grade suspicion of everyone, and a fear of knives (aichmophobia) so profound she has her butcher cut up her meat, she is doing okay.

But then she discovers there is an online community dedicated to surveilling her with particular interest taken by the leader of the forum, Mr. Interested. Every facet of her life is dissected in an online forum complete with photos that are so intrusive as to be terrifying. Mr. Interested in also stirring up others such as a bullying drug dealer and an ex-boyfriend to do things at his behest, much like the Mister Tender character in her father’s novels. She doesn’t waste much time wondering if she is paranoid, she knows in her bones this is a threat.



Mister Tender’s Girl is an intense psychological thriller that succeeds on every level. Wilson never misses a chance to build tension, even incorporating the macabre into the ordinary. For example, Alice takes her coat off and it is “freckled with the corpses of a thousand melted snowflakes.” When she brushes past an untrimmed tree, the needles remind her of “tiny, bony fingers.” I have not come across anyone whose focus on building the tension extended down to those kinds of details, and it works. I had to put this book down a few times, just to warm up, I was feeling so chilled by the tension.

The characters are satisfyingly complex, except perhaps the threatening drug dealer whose extortion efforts are sidetracked by his rage. But then, people who go from calm to raging in moments are more binary than most. The mystery is fair, we get the same clues she does and there is foreshadowing that is easily missed in the moment, but delivers a satisfying “aha!” in the end. I love that Alice is smart and focused on self-preservation. Even when she plans to confront her suspect, she has a backup plan. She does not rush headlong into disaster, though that does not mean things go as planned.

One of my favorite moments was when she flew back to London to meet the twins who stabbed her and were recently released from prison. She doesn’t think they could be behind Mr. Interested since they were in prison but she believes she might find out something useful from them. As she is leaving, one of the sisters smiles at her. “It’s not the plastic, brainwashed smile of her sister. No, this is the smile as it was first ever invented by humans. Not one to convey joy or happiness, but simply to show the enemy your fangs.”

Mister Tender’s Girl may be loosely based on a true crime familiar to many, but it’s completely fresh and original. I find many suspense novels intriguing. I become wrapped up in the search for a solution or for the way out, but this one actually scared me. That doesn’t happen. I am not the type to be scared by a book, but this one succeeded, in large part, I think to the complete immersion in the world of fear and anxiety down to the corpses of snowflakes.

I received an e-galley of Mister Tender’s Girl from the publisher through NetGalley.

Mister Tender’s Girl at SourceBooks
Carter Wilson author site

I eventually found myself immersed in the story. A great quality read.

I had heard great things about this book and even with high expectations going into it, this surpassed ALL of them. This is an author everyone should keep their eyes on.

This book brings to mind “Sharp Objects” by Gillian Flynn which I was also unable to finish. I did give it considerable attention having gotten 1/3 of the way through. The protagonist is deeply flawed and makes terrible choices.

I really enjoyed this book. I have never read anything by this author before but I am very glad that i did. It will certainly not be the last! I could not put it down!

I loved the style of this book. I genuinely felt like I was on a journey with Alice. I found some of the plot to be predictable and at times I wanted to give Alive some observer advice. Overall I would recommend this read to any fans of the thriller/mystery genre. I hope you pick up a copy and enjoy the adventure.

Really enjoyed this book. It did remind me of The Slenderman story. Great characters & storyline

Wow! Mister Tender's Girl is absolutely fantastic. Whether you know about the headlines that inspired the story or not, you will be thrilled. The plot is so fast-paced, you won't be able to put the book down until you've read the last page! Highly recommended to readers of psychological thrillers.

Mr. Tender's Girl is a well written, suspenseful thriller. The plot is a little far-fetched, but that didn't make less interesting to me. The book is full of complex characters and a broken, yet strong female protagonist.
The action scenes when Alice attacks / defends herself were particulary satisfying, but the gore was too much for me later on in the book, so that is why I gave it 3 instead of 4 stars.
Overall, a good story, though!

4.5 *
I’m sure most everyone is familiar with the Slender Man attacks that took place some years ago. This book has a similar theme to that tragic event. (In fact, the author and publishers even recognize and credit the similarities.)

When Alice was growing up she was viciously attacked by two young girls. They explained to the authorities that the fictitious Mr. Tender had encouraged the attack. So...just how far are you willing to go for Mr. Tender?

Years later Alice has come across the pond to the US and is doing her best to put the past behind her and move on. Only someone doesn’t want her to move on. Someone wants to remind her of her past.

“There’s nothing in this world more trapping than one’s own mind”

I once again was fully confident I had this one pinned down from the start! Character and motive. Nope -not even close. So pleasantly surprised!! Kept me on the edge throughout and didn’t / couldn’t put it down! I think this one will be a huge success for 2018! Highly recommend!

A traveling sister read with Brenda and Susanne!

Thank you to both NetGalley and Edelweiss, Sourcebooks Landmark and Carter Wilson for an ARC to review.

For this review and our Full Traveling Sister review please visit Brenda and Norma’s fabulous book blog:
http://www.twogirlslostinacouleereading.wordpress.com