3.5 Stars - "You are an onion I intend to peel, layer by layer. I will love every second of it. Your mystery will yield to me, your dark cocoon penetrated by my patient, steady hands."

I always enjoy stories with obsessive characters. How they stalk their preys, plan for their encounter. How they think about everything, so organized. I know it’s really creepy but what can I say! I like these stories. They're my thing! This one was good too. my complaint is, considering it wasn’t that mysterious I expected it more thrilling and it could have been darker. But the good point was its writing especially Sam’s. As I said I really like to read about his thoughts and his troubled mind! Yep, creepy!

Kate is thirty-eight-year-old, recently divorced and she is a writer and also a college professor. She has a talented student (Sam) but his talent is a bit too dark. He is twenty-two-year-old and he’s obsessed with Kate. Not just her books, but with her every move. He thinks he knows her so well, even better than Kate herself! So he finds his way into her life step by step, by watching her! Told in dual POV, 1st person. It’s a standalone novel. I enjoyed it and I hope you like it as well!

Thanks to Jody Gehrman, Netgalley and St. Martin’s Griffin for the advanced digital copy in exchange an honest review.

Watch Me is a compelling psychological thriller about how far obsession can go. It's easy to see why this would be compared to You. Sam's narrative is reminiscent of Joe's but that's about where the similarities end.

Watch Me alternates between the POV of Sam Grist and Kate Youngblood.
Sam is a grade A sociopath. No doubt about that. He sees the world the way he wants and won't let anything - or anyone - derail his plans. He's worked 5 years to get to Kate and well...he's not about to let go of the fantasy life he's created in his mind.
Kate's had a rough go of it. She's a struggling author, recently divorced and at 38 feeling increasingly invisible. In walks Sam, a 22 year old student in her writing workshop who really sees her. The attraction is undeniable but she's determined not to cross that line. Problem is, he's relentless in his pursuit and seamlessly integrates himself into her life. She just has no idea how far he's willing to go - or has already gone.
I really enjoyed the writing style and despite how disturbing Sam was, I quite liked his character.

Would definitely recommend to fans of psychological thrillers - especially ones featuring stalkers or forbidden desires.

This is the first book I've read by Jody and it did take a bit for it to get started for me but I really enjoyed the dark and sinister character of Sam. I think this story was a little creepy because things like this happen much too often in today's society. It's very easy to follow someone or learn about them online, even when they are cautious. Kate is just a mess to me and it took me quite a bit to have any sympathy for her in the beginning. Sam was the most interesting to me because we got a chance to see inside the "bad" guy's mind and his version of reality.
This was a great read!

This is a very suspenseful read. However, it fell flat for me.

Kate Youngblood is a professor at Blackwood college and also a writer. Her life is not easy, she is divorced, has only one close friend, her writing is in struggle. And then, she starts to be stalked by one of her student, Sam Grist who is obsessed with her and her work. He has been planning to get her in his life for so long.

This story goes by Kate and Sam's point of view, I normally don't like different POV but
this one was fine, if this is only one parson's POV, I may get bored quickly.

Well, I didn't fully understand what I am reading about at the beginning . I got very annoyed by Kate, she is just accepting and too calm for Sam's intrusion to her life and that makes me I'm reading some kind of romance. She likes the attention from the young attractive student, but it makes the story less creepy and flat, it's crashing Sam's creepiness.


---His eerie way of watching me - so intense, like I'm the first woman he's ever seen---


Despite she is an English professor, writer and late 30s, she didn't show any intelligence, she keeps guiding herself in bad situation, she does things it's obvious that lead her in bad position, and get panicked.

It was interesting to read about creepiness of obsession and delusion.

I gave this 2.8 stars

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.