I have to say I am really over the unreliable female narrator. I hated The Girl on the Train and Gone Girl. Neither of the protagonists in this book were people I cared about, which is an essential element for any book. If you don't like the characters, you cannot like the book. I am probably the only reviewer who will say this, but...sorry, not my cup of tea.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for the Kindle ARC of Everyone Knows How Much I Love You. One part old high school friendships, one part Single White Female, Not everyone would enjoy reading about Rose and Lacie, friends with a past that would make one question why they were ever friends at all. Rose seems to be obsessed with Lacie, who is prettier, wealthier and more talented than she is. Their friendship in high school ends when Rose attempts to take Lacie's boyfriend, and then intentionally wrecks her car and injures Lacie's boyfriend. Fast-forward 10 years and Lacie is living in NYC, with her own apartment and some success. She has a boyfriend, nice clothes and a full life. Rose is still struggling and decides to attempt to befriend the estranged Lacie. She moves to NYC, with no plan, nowhere to live, no money. She worms her way back into Lacie's life and eventually becomes her roommate. History repeats itself - Rose becomes obsessed with Lacie and her life. She begins writing a book about her experiences with Lacie, unbeknownst to Lacie. I enjoyed the story, even though Rose is very difficult to like, which is the point. Kyle McCarthy does an effective job of making the characters just unlikable enough to be convincing. A sense of dread prevails, even when the reader knows the situation between Rose and Lacie is going to spiral downward.

I was intrigued by this because I love books about female friendships--especially toxic ones. But this was a heartbreaking story and often very depressing because of the anguish that Rose causes in her "best" friend, Lacie's life. They'd been friends since grade school and then when Rose seduces Lacie's boyfriend in high school, of course they have a falling-out. Fast forward to their 30's when Rose insinuates herself back in unsuspecting Lacie's life, even moving in with her although she doesn't have money for rent. Working on her first novel, Rose is planning to relate the story of their friendship and Lacie--who is always forgiving and friendly--has no idea how devious Rose really is. So yes, it's often hard to read as there are some cringe-worthy scenes but ultimately it's a really interesting story of a friendship and how often we hurt the ones we love and admire.

Rose leads a very fictitious life. Her personality is that she doesn’t know how to hold on to something good, and she burns everything in her wake. Rose is not a likable character, but her self-destruction makes this book so good. She’s knowledgeable and college-educated, but she’s incredibly awkward, a broken and pathetic person.

I don’t feel this is a catfight as some other reviewers have said because Lacie is just an ultra-forgiving woman who keeps allowing Rose back into her life. All the drama that occurs between the two of them is because of Rose’s gnawing need to destroy everything in her path. She grows obsessed, and as that obsession grows, she spirals. Her perception of reality is hyper-skewed, and we see that in her inner dialogue and confrontations with Lacie.

The writing was excellent. The pacing was slow, and that suited the narrative. The things that Rose does is completely cringe-worthy, and there’s beauty in that because she’s an exceptionally well-written, bad guy who has no redeeming qualities like so many of these friendships portrayed elsewhere. Not everyone can get on board with such a toxic person in fiction, which is a shame because she’s written so well. The prose in this is beautiful, and it makes for a truly fun read. Thank you Ballantine Books for sending this along!

This debut novel is as precious and shallow as its protagonist. Shallow because neither of the two women, Emily or Lacie, seems like more than a cutout figure, and precious because of its central conceit : a struggling writer trying to finish a roman a clef about the incident that ruptured an idyllic friendship in late adolescence while sharing an apartment with that same woman a decade later. The betrayal that ensues- the second one in this relationship, perpetrated by the writer- is both predictable and prefigured: it's hard to care about the decidedly devious and unappealing Emily, and Lacie is equally one dimensional, at least as observed by the writer.

I really enjoyed Everyone Knows How Much I Love You, a literary psychological thriller in the vein of Lindsay Hunter's Ugly Girls, Julie Buntin's Marlena, and Mary Gaitskill's Two Girls, Fat and Thin. While I wouldn't say there's much that's new about this book, it does distill the most compelling elements of these other books into one novel, which I devoured in just a few days. Everyone Knows How Much I Love You raised interesting questions on the ethics of writing fiction about one's real life, especially in the case of the narrator, Rose, who ends up living with her friend who happens to be the subject of her novel. Rose is a truly terrible person, but I found her to be an engaging character who I rooted for in spite of her decisions to ruin the lives of others. McCarthy is a strong and confident writer, and I look forward to reading her other work in the future.
(3.5 rounded up)

The presentation to this book was fantastic; I loved the cover, the synopsis, everything about it really resonated with a creepy, psychological thriller that would involve two girls with this toxic relationship, one becomes obsessed with the other-- I'm in. Even though the plot wasn't necessarily original, in the sense that it kind of feels like that one movie about the roommate who was obsessed with the other girl-- you know the one!-- there are a hundred stories like this one, but I thought it was well-written and the book was easy to follow. I enjoyed that it was female relationships, I thought that gave it a very different set up than a lot of books that follow male/female obsessed relationships. There were a lot of parts that I liked, a lot that didn't really sit well with me. Overall, I think this book was fine, I wasn't obsessed (!) with it.

The characters were well-written and played out, I think that the women were different and had their quirks about them. The only real issue I have with most books right now is the unrealistic set of New York City-- there are many other cities in the world, and New York isn't the only one. Let's get more creative with our settings! The story development was good, and I finished it. So, I'd say it was pretty good overall. I think the questions that this book really portrays are mostly, do we ever really change? Looking back at Rose and Lacie in high school, is betrayal really forever?

Thank you NetGalley, Ballantine publisher, and the author for providing me with an ARC copy of this book in exchange for my honest opinion.

𝐄𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐲𝐨𝐧𝐞 𝐊𝐧𝐨𝐰𝐬 𝐇𝐨𝐰 𝐌𝐮𝐜𝐡 𝐈 𝐋𝐨𝐯𝐞 𝐘𝐨𝐮 𝐛𝐲 𝐊𝐲𝐥𝐞 𝐌𝐜𝐂𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐡𝐲. Thanks to @ballantinebooks and @netgalley for the e-book in exchange for an honest review. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⁣
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When Rose moves to NYC, she just wants to fit in, similar to how she felt in high school. She inserts herself back into the life of her childhood best friend, Lacie, regardless of their troubled history. ⁣
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I enjoyed this book. I loved the examination of the friendship from the narrator’s perspective. Her struggle with self-esteem and how she is perceived really made the book. She felt like such a real character. As time goes on, you really get a sense of the dissonance between how she sees herself and how others view it, but she just doesn’t get it. The parts from her high school days were fun for me, as it sounded like the same time period that I was in school. The book was very descriptive and a bit meta; a book about writing a book about the events in the book. If you enjoy books about friendships and living in NYC in your twenties, you’ll love this. Bonus points for enjoying unreliable narrators. ⁣
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“𝘞𝘩𝘺 𝘥𝘪𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘪𝘨𝘯𝘰𝘳𝘦𝘥 𝘨𝘪𝘳𝘭 𝘴𝘵𝘪𝘭𝘭 𝘭𝘪𝘷𝘦 𝘪𝘯𝘴𝘪𝘥𝘦 𝘮𝘦? 𝘞𝘩𝘺 𝘸𝘢𝘴 𝘐 𝘴𝘵𝘪𝘭𝘭 𝘤𝘢𝘳𝘳𝘺𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘩𝘦𝘳 𝘢𝘳𝘰𝘶𝘯𝘥?” ⁣

Thanks to NetGalley for the advanced reader copy of this book. I tried to get into this book. I always love books about female friendships and love them even more when they are set in NYC- my forever home! However, I did not find the characters likable and the story just did not engage me.

Everyone Knows How Much I Love You by Kyle McCarthy caught my attention as soon as I read the synopsis. Who doesn’t love a story about toxic friendships?!? Unfortunately, McCarthy missed everything that would have made this book mesmerizing & hard to put down. It just went in too many directions. I couldn’t relate to any of the characters. I tried hard with this one. This book just didn’t work for me. I DNF’d it.

Thank you so much to Netgalley and to Random House Publishing for an advance copy of this book in exchange for a honest review. Expected release date us set for June 23, 2020.

Thank you so much Net Galley for this opportunity

This book was a slow start for me, however, once I found that moment, I was enthralled, This was very well written and I wasn’t sure about Rose through the book. I didn’t like nor dislike her, rather I felt like I couldn’t get a handle on her but one thing was for certain, she creeped me out and I didn’t trust her.

Toxic Friendship, obsession, single-white female vibe throughout this book for me
3.5 stars

Yet another story about a toxic female friendship, you know the one where two women are uncomfortably close for all the wrong reasons and it ends up poisoning both of their lives. Yet another New York story, you know where people are so enamoured by the myth of the city that they find themselves doing stupid things just to get by. Such as foolishly rekindling a friendship of bygone days to have a place to stay. To be fair, the protagonist of this novel has motives much more complicated than having no place to live, she is driven by a low grade obsession to enmesh herself into every detail of her former friend’s life, which seems to be how she both loves and punishes her unwitting victim, Lacie. Maybe the moral is that friendships ought not to be revisited and the past is best left in the past. After all, there is a reason their connection ended once. In high school Lacie was no less the shining light and her friend no less a ship driven to those shores by a complicated mess of affection and jealousy. It nearly ended in tragedy. And now at thirty the two meet again, oh what a small village NYC is after all and some such crap and turns out they are tentatively tethered once again, through a man Lacie is dating, the blonde curlyhaired mountain of artistic ambition named Ian. And so it begins again, the friendship for wrong reasons, the friendship that should not be. The ying and yang that absolutely ought not to go together, because, despite the famous maxi, some opposites do not attract, they positively repel. Or at least ought to if they know what’s good for them. Lacie is presented as simply too kind, too nurturing, too decent of a person to notice at first or to properly react when she finally does the toxicity seeping into her life through her new/old friend. And our protagonist…well, she’s another story altogether. In fact this is her story and her very character is still almost too slippery to figure out. She’s obsessive, possessive, needy, well educated, but not very world smart, directionless but for the novel she’s been writing all these years. A semiautobiographical number featuring the early years of the very friendship she is currently so busy setting on fire. She is doing numerous rewrites that echo her real life, flesh out the character of Lacie, explain your motivations, etc. Complicated things for someone with an obviously stunted emotional intelligence. It appears that for her writing this novel is a way to exorcise personal demons. Not so much a career goal even. Which makes her somehow even less likeable. In fact, there’s every chance the most notable thing about this novel is how compelling of a read it is considering how thoroughly unpleasant and unlikeable the main character is. You don’t even really come away thinking you got to know her. She’s consistently opaque as she is failing in establishing genuine personal connections with either her real world or her audience of readers. Yet it isn’t nearly as much fun as a proper female stalker something like Single White Female. This isn’t even a thriller, though it has the making of, this is very much a work of psychological drama, well written, well intentioned, but it doesn’t have much to say outside of serving as a cautionary tale about the dangers of the dark motivations and secrets of people you let into your life. I did love the way the fictional novel writing echoed the real life in a pleasingly symmetrical meta fashion. For this novel the editorial note would be…we still don’t know the main character all that much and we don’t like what is known of her. Is she just pure id? Is there more to her that her actions because her interior life is almost purely in service of her immediate desires without much thought given to others around her. Is it really just all jealousy motivated? Is this merely a fable of opposites…how it plays out when a person who elevates those around her meets a person who poisons(not literally, told you it isn’t a thriller) those around her. At any rate, there you have it, you can read it for yourself and decide, though I’m not sure I can recommend it, it isn’t a sort of thing to warn away from either. It reads well and quickly. And means to provide a profound insight into the ugly side of the female friendships, it really does. Thanks Netgalley.

I had a hard time with this one. I love stories like this and wanted to like it, I just could not connect with either Rose or Lacie and especially did not like Rose. Why did Lacie allow Rose to move in in the first place, for starters. The story deals with female friendship and obsession, but I never really understands why Rose was obsessed with Lacie. Maybe that's the point? Why is anyone ever obsessed with anyone? This is not a bad or poorly written store, just wasn't for me.

Thank you to NetGalley, Kyle McCarthy and Random House for this ARC.

I really was intrigued by this book. But, this really did not sit well with me. I found myself 30% in still unsure of what the point was and if anything was going to happen. A lot of narrative, a lot of creepy actions for a lot of it. I appreciate the description but this fell flat for me.

Seductive and inquisitive, this book engrossed me from the start. Dealing with obsession, friendship and sexuality, "Everyone Knows How Much I Love You" is a pure delight to fans of psychological thrillers and noir drama.

Rose is a self-determined (and hella selfish and aloof) thirty-year-old who has just moved to New York City. As the story begins, she randomly meets face to face with her high school best friend Lacie. We know that something shady happened between the two, and that Rose was the one betraying Lacie, but without any details. We can tell, however, that Rose is a master manipulator as she convinces Lacie that they should live together... and the drama truly begins. As the story evolves, we get get to know Rose's dark side as a highly sexual stalker and sociopath who will do anything to get what she wants.

The writing style is vivid and simply phenomenal, especially as a debut novel. I truly couldn't put it down, **needing** to find out what on earth was going on in Rose's head. Another fascinating perspective was how she was impacting everyone around her using manipulation. With this kind of darkness and psychological suspense, this book was right up my alley.

*Thank you to the Publisher for a free advance copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

***Thank you to NetGalley and Random House Publishing for an advance copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. Expected release date June 23, 2020.***

2 - 2.5 stars

I really tried with this book, but I couldn't get into the story. Rose, the main character, is supposed to be fierce and smart, but to me was neither, just very unlikeable. Lacie, the former friend from high school, wasn't much better. I couldn't buy into the idea that the two managed to reconnect after high school, let alone Lacie asking Rose to move into her apartment.

The story itself isn't bad; this one just wasn't for me.

I just don’t know how I feel about this book. I loved some parts and I did not enjoy others. I am a sucker for a female friendship dynamics theme in a book and I was so excited to dive into this story. However, I was left wanting more and there were many questions at the end of the book that I never got any answer to.

Rose was a perfect protagonist, with her obsessive and unpredictable behavior, even though I am still confused about her motives to act the way she did. On the other hand, we have Lacie, who was such a weak and uninspiring female character but at the same time had a strong influence on Roses’ life. With these two polar opposite characters, the story becomes a convoluted and strangely addictive mix of power struggles, lies, secrets, and erratic actions which often left me cringing and dumbfounded.

What I loved about this book the most is the writing style and Rosie’s though process. One of my favorite quotes is:

“It’s odd, the power we give strangers over our lives, how readily we believe they see the truth of us. It’s as if the burden of knowing ourselves is so great that we lay it down happily, easily, without complaint; as if we think our friends and family are blind, but strangers, random indifferent strangers, possess judgments as arbitrary and definite as God’s”

Thank you NetGalley, Ballantine publisher, and the author for providing me with an ARC copy of this book in exchange for my honest opinion.

I'm going to set this one aside.

Listen, I love love love stories about toxic female friendships. Social Creature and Necessary People being two of my favorites so I was excited to check this book out. Sadly, from page one, I knew this wasn't going to be for me. I just couldn't get a handle on Rose or Lacie. Talk about two boring women.

Funny that in this book Rose is writing a novel and that novel is about what went down between her and Lacie. When she is discussing her draft with her agent her agent has this to say:

"I just don't understand the stakes of the story. I don't get the why of it. Why does this book need to be written?"

And that's exactly how I felt as I was reading this. DNF @ 25% - no rating.

Thank you to NetGalley and Ballantine book for providing me with a digital ARC in exchange for an honest review.

This was not exactly what I expected so my rating is actually a 2 1/2 stars. I would not classify this as a psychological thriller so if you are expecting a "psycho ex-best friend ruins the life of her former bff in a series of sinister, creepy events" this isn't your book. It was definately a "slow burn" and the burn never really turns into a full blown fire, even the climactic scent with Rose and Ian was a "wait, what did I just read" moment. I wasn't a big fan of the writing style as there were so many literary descriptions which to me kind of didn't add to the story and I found myself re-reading several passages wondering why the author chose to add these "wordy" descriptions. I would probably read this author again though as the characters were fleshed out though none of them were completely memorable. Thanks to NetGalley for "granting my wish" .

This tale of a toxic female friendship was simultaneously riveting and hard to read. I kept turning pages, wanting to cover my eyes because I knew something terrible was going to happen. The narrator is so dark and disturbing, yet I felt empathetic to her. This was a train wreck you can’t stop watching as it builds to the final conclusion. You know it’s going to end badly but you can’t stop watching. I was pleased by the ending and I enjoyed the read. My thanks to the publisher for the advance reader in exchange for my honest review.