I really liked the premise of this book. A young female college professor is recently divorced. One of her writing students is stalking her. But he’s hot and he’s a good writer, so she’s drawn to him. “This is Harper Lee and Hunter S. Thompson’s sticky, malformed love child. His work is raw, sloppy, quick. It’s slow where it should be fast and fast where it should be slow. And yet...and yet. There’s something there, the X factor the mark of genius”. Gerhman really sticks the landing when she’s describing Kate’s reaction to finding she’s got someone with real talent in her class. It’s the excitement of getting to nurture an emerging voice balanced by the fear of screwing it up.

The novel is told from the alternating perspectives of Sam and Kate. What really amazed me is how Gerhman really has each voice speak in their own language. Oh my God, Sam’s voice is perfect. It is just as raw, as lush as Kate describes his writing. We, the readers, get a real sense of how twisted he is. Literally batshit crazy.

The plot does go over the top and at times you need to suspend belief. Once or twice I wished Gerhman had an editor to tame her writing like Kate tried for Sam. But this is a creepy, disturbing fun read.

My thanks to netgalley and St. Martin’s Press for an advance copy of this book.

My apologies but I could not complete this book. I found the premise to be rather sexist, with the woman weak and unintelligent, and the bad guy more compelling. In today's world of #metoo, it could be a tough sell for liberal women.

What an incredible book. To say this is good is truly an understatement. The heroine is a English professor at a small university in the mid west and also a published author. She has been divorced for a short time from her husband of ten years and is feeling invisible to men due to her age. However one of her students has developed an obsession with her that she is totally unaware of. He is the only one in her class with real talent for writing so as she starts to work with him a relationship develops. She is up for tenure and knows a romantic tryst with a student would be professional suicide so even though she is attracted to him she tells him nothing can ever come of it. The student doesn't want to accept this and therein lies the problem. The author has a great command of language and the story is completely believable. I highly recommend this book.

Watch me was a fabulous and exciting read. I lost too much sleep just trying to see what was going to happen next!!! Read this!

Some possible spoilers.
This book did nothing for me... ‘Gripping psychological thriller’ is banded around so often, but this book just wasn’t that. The story is told from the internal monologues of two people - Kate, the late 30s English professor & Sam the early 20s student who is obsessed with her.
And that’s pretty much it. There’s a couple of scenes where Kate is in danger, but it’s very one dimensional. There’s a twist if you can call in that where Kate craves & enjoys the attention as she’s feeling invisible now she’s no longer young & effortlessly attractive.
This is a bog standard sociopath stalker story, but it didn’t give me the creeps or keep me in suspense like it should have.

What a great read. Enjoyed this story from start to finish.

This is a very good book. The first half was slow and easy reading, and the second half was definitely a page-turner! The writing is insightful and wise, and creepy. I recommend this book!

A great read - very descriptive writing and interest in what will happen next!

Very good thriller. The main character was extremely creepy which is of course what we want in a good thriller. Great book that will keep you guessing to the end.

A quite original take on the boyfriend/stalker theme but it took a while to get going. Convincing characters and descriptive settings.

Sometimes, as a reader, I pick up a book and it turns out it was written just for me. That's how Watch Me felt. This has a bit of the same stalkerish, psychologically thrilling feel as You by Caroline Kepnes, another book that I really enjoyed and that made me think, "I wish more books were like this." Watch Me fits that bill nicely.

Sam Grist is a 22 year old undergrad taking Kate's creative writing workshop. She published one hit, followed by a less than stellar second novel. She is in her 30s, trying to establish herself as an English professor and striving for tenure. Sam has already planned out their future in his mind and will stop at nothing to make it happen.

Even if that means stalking Kate, hacking her email, getting her fired, and murdering her boyfriend. No big deal in the face of love, right?

The book toggles between Sam's POV and Kate's POV. At first she is taken with him and his intense desire for her. I mean, who wouldn't be? But as the story progresses, the pieces of Sam's innocent facade start to fall apart and she begins to realize exactly who she's dealing with.

I devoured this book, turning pages as quickly as my flu-ridden mind would let me. Sam is both disarmingly intriguing and horrifying all in one. I couldn't help but kind of like him while at the same time feeling horrified by everything he was doing and everything he represented. Definitely recommend for fans of Kepnes or fans of psychological thrillers!

Overall, a solid thriller with a strong ending. (I fear though with that generic title and cover I'll have a hard time recalling this book's name a month from now.)

I thought the author did a great job of bringing Sam to life, but Kate, less so. Kate makes some pretty stupid choices throughout the book, and I LIKED that. It would have been too formulaic to have this be a traditional predator vs prey plot. To have the prey enjoy some of that attention and to be attracted to the predator back, was very interesting.

However, I felt like we needed to know more about Kate and her back story to understand her feelings. Yes, you could attribute her behavior and choices to her being over 40 and struggling with being less wanted, attractive, etc. However, I know many women of that age (and am one myself) who have those feelings, but still wouldn't buy what Sam is selling. There needed to be more to Kate and I felt like the book didn't dive into that.

It felt at times like these two main characters were equally flawed, unlikeable, and wounded (although, of course Sam is more so since he's willing to kill people). The alternating perspectives enhanced this flavor. That structure made for an interesting book, one which could have ended many different ways. Overall I would have loved the author to have taken that premise even further.

Thanks to the author and NetGalley for granting me the opportunity to read this book in exchange for an honest review.

Watch Me contains a high measure of creepy and was a fast read (I read it in a day) but …
Muddling through her late 30s as a creative writing professor, Kate Youngblood feels like she is disappearing. Sam Grist is Kate’s most promising student, but he’s not there solely to be the best writer. He’s been watching and wanting her for years. Yes, years! Sam wants her no matter the cost.
The entire time I was reading Watch Me, I felt this underlying measure of intensity, creepiness and anxiousness. Sam’s character is written so well that I turned the pages eager to know what he would do next. However, Sam’s story contains a good deal of repetition, as if the author was going for a word count and not depth. I didn’t like Kate’s character at all. She bugged me because I couldn’t relate to her. I’m a woman in my late 30s and I could not see myself acting like she did.

When I closed this book, I was left feeling incomplete. There were some points regarding Sam’s past that I wish had been explored further and the ending felt anti-climactic after the build-up throughout. That being said, all the main points of the story were satisfactorily closed, this reader just wanted a little bit more.

Watch Me was good enough that I’ll be checking out future works by Ms. Gehrman. Fans looking for their next read featuring a character that gives you chills should grab this one.

4.5 stars

Watch Me is exquisitely written, raw story of obsession gone wrong. The book is very engrossing, reading it was akin to watching a train going at full speed toward a crash. You know it's going to end bad but you can't look away. The story is told in dual POV that alternates between Sam, a college student obsessed with his English professor and Kate, the said professor. Sam was such a dark disturbing character, I found him very fascinating. It was a lot more interesting to be in Sam's head than Kate's. I found a little difficult to connect with her.

I thought the best part of the book was the writing. Despite the dark subject matter the book is written in beautiful lyrical prose. I found myself highlighting many passages and swooning over wonderful sentences.
I enjoyed Watch Me immensely and would recommend this book to anyone who likes dark suspenseful stories with complex unreliable narrators.

Five stars!

An incredible mystery/suspense thriller that will keep you on the edge of your seat. I loved it. Excellent writing, realistic dialogue, wonderful character development. Found this book in the Read New section of Netgalley and was thrilled to discover how riveting it was. Highly recommend!

I found this book to be very okay-ish. Not great but not bad either, just somewhere in between. Sam Grist was this 22 year-old guy obsessed with his 38 year-old favorite author, Kate Youngblood, who ironically wasn't very young blooded. And then you have the regular possessive-stalker-turned-murderer routine.

Very textbook.

I'm not saying that this book did not have potential- it most definitely did. Sam made for an interesting character, but Kate was too plain-Jane to pull it off. Sam called her skittish, I'll call her a wallflower. The whole book you hear about how she's fading into the background, but do you see her do anything? No.

I think the author pussied out from writing a more interesting character, and played it safe. Well, when I am reading psychological thriller, I don't like safe. So, I'm not very happy with this book, but the writing was good- not enough to keep me hooked right until the end, but enough that I had the need to still finish it off.

Thanks to netgalley and the publisher for the opportunity to read and review this book.
Kate is a struggling writer and teacher who is disillusioned with her life and with her ability to create another successful novel.
Sam is a mature student of Kate's who is fixated with her. He has studied her work for years and now watches her every move.
To Kate, Sam displays a maturity beyond his years and an ability to write with a freshness and talent which both astonishes and intrigues her.
As Sam's obsession grows and Kate remains unaware of his feelings, could she be in danger?
Loved the book. It was well written and even contained a few darkly humorous moments which made me smile.
A rare five stars from me.

OK so this book has a SERIOUSLY creepy beginning and it goes on from there. Dark and disturbing for sure.

Watch Me is pretty much your stereotypical stalker book. The stalker obsessing about his prey and fantasizing about the life they will have together when the object of his affection realizes they are in fact, supposed to be together. And of course doing all these crazy stalker things along the way out of jealousy/infatuation/craziness. As it stands it would probably be a 4-5 star book for people that are into this genre. It is very well written and the blurb tells you exactly what you need to know about the book. For me though it was too repetitive and stalkerish-but-nothing-else-happening to love.

WATCH ME has a very strong You/Hidden Bodies (both by Caroline Kepnes) vibe, only here the object of affection actually likes the person back (even though god knows they shouldn't). You and Hidden Bodies are the type of stalker / crazy narrator books that I like, but they just felt so different from WATCH ME. I loved those two novels, but this one fell a tad flat for me. I think it was just all the obsessing that Sam does the entire time and nothing else really seems to happen.

There is definitely quite a bit of repetition in this book in Sam's POV that I wasn't crazy about (Kate's point of view wasn't as repetitive). He literally obsesses about the exact same things like the entire novel. We also learn what I felt to be very little about his background, I would have liked to know more.

Final Thought: Personally, I didn't love this one, but I think lovers of straightforward stalker stories will love it. Like I said earlier, very well written, just not the story for me. Overall a fast read though, and I didn't skim anything so there is that too! I just couldn't bring myself to give it more than a 3 because of my personal preferences.

My review can be seen right now on my blog and my Goodreads account.

Blog: https://readingbetweenwinessite.wordpress.com/2017/12/26/book-review-watch-me-by-jody-gehrman/

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2188650380

I have also posted it on my Instagram (Bookstagram): https://www.instagram.com/p/BdLVsVHgDAD/?hl=en&taken-by=reading.between.wines

‘After five years waiting for this moment, watching you for the first time still catches me off guard.’

Kate Youngblood is a creative writing professor at Blackwood College. She’s aged in her 30s, and starting to feel as though life is passing her by. Kate is recently divorced, her husband has left her a younger woman. Kate has been unable to replicate the success of her first novel: her second novel has failed. Kate’s poised between the success of her past, and the possibility of an invisible future. Will anyone now want to get to know her?

Kate’s most promising student is Sam Grist. He has a raw talent which Kate wants to nurture. But Sam, whose writing tends towards the dark and twisted, has more than one secret. Sam is obsessed by Kate. He’s been working on learning more about her, preparing to get to know her in person for five years. Sam envisages a life with Kate: she’s ‘the one’ for him. As Sam insinuates himself into Kate’s life, he starts to take control.

‘I’ve been worried about your judgment for quite some time now.’

Kate is torn between being attracted to Sam, and recognising the inappropriateness of any personal relationship. She’s intrigued by him, flattered (up to a point) by the attention he pays her. But just how far will Kate let Sam into her life? And, can she stop him?

‘Isn’t it sad, the way we grasp the beauty of everything too late?’

The chapters alternate between the perspectives of Sam and Kate. In Sam’s view, his actions are both logical and justified as he demonstrates to Kate why they are made for each other. I found Kate’s perspective more difficult, as she is torn between what she thinks she wants and what she knows she should do. And the ending? You’ll need to read it for yourself. Just keep in mind that obsession is dangerous, and may even be fatal.

Note: Note: My thanks to NetGalley and St Martin’s Press for providing me with a free electronic copy of this book for review purposes.

Jennifer Cameron-Smith

Kate is a creative writing professor at a college. She is divorced and at a stand still in her life. Sam is one of her most promising students. Sam has been watching Kate for years, trying to find a way into her life.

This book is written in the first person which is not my favorite style of writing. Also there are alternating chapters told from Sam and Kate’s point of view. I didn’t like that either. Sam is a very troubled, make that crazy individual. Kate was not a very interesting character to me, she was hard for me to relate to. The psychological suspense part of the book was good, I just had trouble with it being in first person and having the alternate chapters. Thank you to net galley for an advanced readers copy.