I received an advanced copy via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

So, I don't know what I just read. It was twisted enough to keep reading because I wanted to know what happened. But I'm not sure what happened or how it got to the point which it did.

A young woman is selected as a body double for a celebrity, Rosanna Feld, (think a Kardashian of sorts) to make appearances since Rosanna is suffering from crippling depression/anxiety/addiction. But the assistant, Max, who has selected the new Rosanna has some intense work for her to take on before she can make her public debut.

Saying any more would give spoilers. I'm unsure if I liked this. It felt extremely repetitive. I'm not sure if that was a choice to make me feel anxious while reading, or if the author was trying to flesh out a short story to novel length.

If you like a twisted commentary on celebrity and body image and obsession, give it a whirl.

An unnamed women has been hired to be a celebrities body double. She has to act the part and pretend to be this famous women who has supposedly had a mental breakdown. Max is her only contact with the outside world while she studies her role. This was a novel of obsession but not the type I was expecting. Turns out the unnamed women is the one who becomes crazy and obsessed. Lots of long, rambling inner dialogue.

It wasn't my favorite; the pacing was odd and while the premise was fantastic, I found most of the characters, particularly our unnamed protagonist difficult to invest in in any meaningful way.

Shades of Hitchcock but not quite enough and I predicted the "surprise" which is always a let-down.

Thank you very much to Emily Beyda, Doubleday Books and NetGalley for giving me the chance to read and review this ARC.

The Body Double is about a common girl who is approached to be a body double for a celebrity. Hitchcock’s movie Vertigo and the new book I read and reviewed a while back The Paper Wasp we’re both a little similar to this one.
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My reactions, in order, as I read:
“Whoa, this book is weird and that’s a heck of a lot of internal monologue.”
“This character is bizarre and she certainly doesn’t behave like I would.”
“Well THAT seems highly unlikely!”
“I have to keep reading to see if I’m right about what I think is going to happen.”
“Nope, I was so wrong.”
“Whoa this book is weird!”
“I HAVE to know how this book ends!”
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I read it in a day. Besides some plot points I was still wondering about, a few times when the reader is smarter than the character (I hate when that happens), and maybe a too-quick ending, I enjoyed this as a creepy, suspenseful, clean read. I like to share mature content and I think this adult book only had three or four curse words.

For anyone who finds Hitchcockian plotting irresistible, this is the novel for you! Raising tantalizing issues about identity even as it whiplashes the reader with surprise after surprise, THE BODY DOUBLE delivers an irresistibly enthralling read. Emily Beyda is a new young writer to put on your must-read list.

I was excited to get this book and had high hopes for it, but the reading of it was not what I had hoped. I found the premise intriguing: the thought of escaping one's one humdrum life to live as someone completely different. But the book itself plodded along like so much navel gazing. Nothing really much happened. There were no real surprises, so no thriller aspect for me. I didn't know enough about the main character to give a rap about her. Maybe that was the intent? And I didn't really know enough about the person the main character was replacing to truly care what happened to her, although I guessed it pretty much from the time the main character arrived at the apartment. Again, perhaps this was the intent: to illustrate the shallowness of Hollywood (as the scapegoat for greater American society?), how ridiculous the "famous person as health expert good-life guru" trend is, etc. And if that was the only point, then it was made ad nauseam. I was so glad to finish the book and move on to something else.

All that said, I very much appreciate the opportunity given to me by NetGalley and the publisher to read the galley of this novel. And perhaps there will be a readership for it, just as there is evidently quite a viewership for reality television. Those folks will be the ones to whom I recommend this title .

I definitely enjoyed the complexity of this story line. It had me going and I was thinking that at some point all the stuff was going to hit the fan. Everything came to a boiling point. The characters were a tad bit creepy. Our narrator has no name and it makes sense since she is taking on the identity of someone else.  Not only that, she tells us a few details about the life she left behind like her foster mom and her biological father and in all honesty, no one will miss her.   She has to give up her past life in order to carry out this elaborate plan of pretending to be a Hollywood actress, Rosanna Feld. She has to learn her mannerisms, dress like her, and even live like her to an extent.  The amount of work that has to be done is ridiculous. She has to get plastic surgery and eat like her. Not only that, she is trapped in this apartment for months learning to be like Rosanna by watching these videos that Max shows her. This book is definitely not like anything that I've read before in the sense that it is difficult to tell whether or not the narrator is really Rosanna or really pretending to be her.

Max, the man who is helping our narrator, does not come off as trustworthy to me.  He is weird and creepy. Our narrator has never really been loved and somehow he knows that. How long has he been watching our narrator and what is his relationship with Rosanna?  Whatever their relationship may be, it’s weird. I know he is supposed to guide our narrator, but he seems too close to the situation. Also, how is he seeing everything that they do?  There was a large amount of videos that our narrator watched in order to copy Rosanna’s voice and know what she wanted to order or what she would buy. Where does Max go when he leaves our narrator? There are so many questions that I had while reading and everything just made him seem more creepy. You have to wait until the end to figure out why our narrator must pretend to be Rosanna. All I’m saying is that I knew Max was weird and that nothing in this story seemed quite right when it came to him.

I’m not sure I would be able to give up my life and become someone else even if money was involved.  I would not want to lose my family or friends. Even though my life may not be as fabulous, I definitely appreciate everything that I have been given.  This book will make you question what would you do and have you looking at everyone around you more closely. I don’t think I would enjoy being told what I can and cannot do or being told when I can and cannot leave.  The only way I would be able to do this is if I really had no one in my life that cared for me or would miss me if I disappeared. I am most uncomfortable with the idea of someone watching me at all times and me having to change everything about myself to fit into this lifestyle.  I enjoyed this story and the creepiness that I felt while reading it. At every turn there was a new discovery or a new question that I needed answered.

This book will be available on March 3, 2020.

Three, no, this is not the book I dreamed to dive into, the plot was intriguing, the beginning was interesting, but then all slowness no play made me dull and ax carrying Jack Torrence kind of disturbed person because I’m so bored to death stars!!!!

When I start reading this book I asked myself these questions:
Do you like Almodovar’s movie “Skin I live” based on Thieery Jonquet’s “Tarantula” novel? YES!

What about Hitchcock’s “Suspicion”, “Vertigo” and “Rebecca”? Are you kidding me, hell YES!

Do you fan of classics like “Bride of Frankenstein” and “Sunset Boulevard”? Let’s consider I didn’t ask myself this because I want to scream : “YESSSS!”

You may find small pieces of all these amazing projects inside this book; some of them as a big portion and some of them as small crumbles.

It’s claustrophobic, disturbing, giving you headache, bad stomach, heaves, depression, frustration and finally you want to throw the book against the wall and scream: “ENOUGH” because its slow burn, its merciless, savage tone and two characters who are suffering from OCD made you run out of patience. You started to think, those insane couple are created for each other like Kanye and Kim( they look like an angel comparing with these two characters) or Johnny Depp and Amber Heard ( Okay they’re equally bad like them).

A young woman accepts a job willing being a double of Hollywood star Rosanna by losing her whole identity, leaving her past, forgetting her likes, dislikes, dreams, opinions. She was so ready to forget her own name.

Max, who hired her, encouraged her, tortured her to become a real Rosanna with EXTREME METHODS: Locking her up in a house, only activities are reading magazines about Rosanna or watching the parrots from her window, forcing her smoking and drinking diet coke ( for having bad skin and looking as older as Rosanna! WTF! Yes that’s the f*ck!), over exaggerated exercise program and vegan diet with ultra- small portions, letting the butcher doctor destroy her face (this may be called plastic surgery, but still…) The methods got more extreme, the characters started to make more miserable each other.

I knew that our heroine had no friends, no close family members or proper job before. So I can empathize her decision to leave her old life behind and start from the fresh but doing this by stealing somebody’s identity and being obsessive about it by losing rest of her marbles, well sorry but we have batshit crazy heroine and sadistic, unpredictable, arrogant Max ( Please don’t push me to call him “hero”, he is just a very bad guy. Worse than Billie Eilish’s song defined.)!

I happily announce that: THE MOST HATED, UNLIKABLE, IRRITATING CHARACTERS AWARD goes to… YES, OUR CHARACTERS gathered all the statues! Let’s congratulate them.

As a summary, why this book irritated me so much:
1) Extreme slow-burn thrilling: You may foresee the biggest secret and revelation. You don’t need to read extra 200 pages!
2) Unlikable, detesting characters with psychological disorders.
3) Lack of wittiness, expected, foreseeable, repeating itself!
4) References inspired this book are amazing but the slow pacing and lack of curiosity killed all these wonderful elements and wasted all potential!
5) It reminded me a theater play more than a book. Long, slow, psychologically exhausting chapters, mostly one location oriented story-telling and whole book centered between two characters. Let’s call it “BORRRRINNGGG!”

So yes, I was so excited to read this book but it was really above my expectations. I’m keen on reading debut authors and meet with their fresh perspective but this book failed me.

Thank you so much NetGalley and Doubleday for sharing this ARC COPY in exchange my honest review.

I really had a difficult time getting into this book. Our was well written but I found the characters unlikable, the situation disturbing and forced myself to finish the book.

This was just not right the right book for me.

Thank you to the author/publisher/Netgalley for the opportunity to read this book in exchange for a fair and honest review.

A rather opaque book in many ways, it really had me thinking about identity. A woman is hired to impersonate a reclusive celebrity and slowly loses some of herself in the process. The book was a little confusing at parts but well written and entertaining. It"s interesting to think what you would do in that situation.

3.5 stars

“There is something half remembered there, some other name, the contours of a profile glimpsed in a dark mirror, a bad dream disappearing back into the muddy depths of sleep...”

Emily Beyda’s 'The Body Double' features a nameless protagonist, who finds her sense of self—and her sanity—slipping away, as she dives deeply into impersonating a famous Hollywood actress. Her only contact with the outside world is the mysterious Max, whom she both loves and fears. And there is also the specter of Rosanna, the diaphanous starlet whom the protagonist is trying to imitate. And as she delves further into Rosanna's world, and begins to impersonate her in public, many questions begin to arise.

This is a deftly written noir that constantly challenges the reader’s perceptions and understanding of the events being portrayed. It’s opaque, almost annoying so, but the opacity works for this particular narrative, because it hinges on a slow unraveling of facts. In some places, the novel is perhaps a little overambitious and convoluted, but there are also moments of suspenseful brilliance.

If you’re a fan of suspense and plot ambiguity and fluidity of interpretation, this is a great read. You have to work for it, but the payoff is worth it.

What a dark and eerie novel that had me guessing until the last page!

The Body Double centers around a a girl who doesn’t have any family and very few friends agreeing to pose as a body double for a Hollywood starlet who has fallen from grace. Being convinced was the easy part, the great Rosanna Feld has been a recluse after suffering a nervous breakdown and is looking to hire someone to pose as her to slowly get herself back into the limelight. Of course, she will have to sign an NDA and will be coached as to how to act and react exactly as Rosanna would. Being that the two ladies are similar looking helps, but the extensive plastic surgery will also assist in her looking like Rosanna’s twin!! Holy heck, from this point I was hooked and couldn’t wait to see how this novel would play out!

They say imitation is the highest form of flattery, but this novel that’s it to a whole new level!! Emily Beyda did a great job with the pacing, I literally never found a good spot to stop reading so I started and finished The Body Double in the same day! I found the storyline intriguing and felt like a fly on the wall as the lines of reality and make-believe blurred! The Body Double is great debut novel and I’m looking forward to reading more from Emily Beyda in the future!

I read about 15% of this, and then I set it aside. The protagonist just seemed inexplicable--her character was not well developed.