It’s heart pounding, exciting, fast pacing, riveting one sit read with two very disturbed and batshit crazy narrators!

Poor Logan, obsessive, stalker, fully committed, dreamy boyfriend is so unlucky in love. He is hot, popular, lacrosse team player who can date any girl he wants but his girlfriend choices couldn’t be so wrong!

Excellent debut novel for Sutanto. The Obsession felt like "You" meets "Pretty Little Liars". I love an unreliable narrator (or the possibility of one) and I really enjoyed the twist of the ending. I would have loved an epilogue wrap up and a few more twists throughout, but overall an enjoyable first story.

This was a quirky YA book. I’d describe it as being a bit like the book/Netflix show You but with a twist. There is a lot of tension in this book and the storyline is somewhat a stretch but it was a nice escapism read. Thanks to the publisher and netgalley for an egalley.

I'm really into YA mysteries and thrillers these days and loved The Obsession's take on the genre focused on, well obsession! Think a YA take on You, but with it's own twists.

Logan falls hard for girls. First, there's Sophie who doesn't reciprocate his love. Then comes Delilah who is the spitting image of Sophie and Logan's new obsession.

Logan is creepy. Hard stop. But his manipulation can be subtle and the juxtaposition between his character and Delilah's abusive stepfather was really compelling. Delilah is an interesting character who surprised me as the book progressed.

Obsession is a quick read that's well-written, tightly plotted and delivers a punch of an ending.

YA thriller fans, add this one to the TBR! I can't wait to see what the author does next.

Really enjoyed this one, didn't realize it wasn't a stand alone. Lived how the author showed how obsession can thrilling and romantic, but also why it isn't.

I really enjoyed this book. The dual perspectives of Logan and Delilah kept the story moving. I was NOT expecting the book to take the turn that it did. I thought it would be a simple book about a stalker. But it was so much more!! I will for sure recommend this to my true crime/mystery loving students!

I love books that are different, whether it be the storyline or characters. I especially love reading books with an unstable MC. When I read the synopsis of The Obsession by Jesse Q Sutanto I had a feeling I would love it. I definitely haven’t read a story similar to it.

Description
The Obsession is told in alternating POVS, Logan and Delilah. Logan is struggling to cope with his “friend” Sophie’s death until he meets Delilah. Not only does she look a little like Sophie, but he feels a pull to her that he can’t describe. From the moment he meets her he knows they are meant to be. He does all his homework on her, including looking up all her social media and watching her through a camera he hooked up right outside her house. He will do anything to have her fall in love with him. Even if he has to “blackmail” her with the tape that shows her murdering her abusive stepfather. He does it in love though, of course.

Delilah doesn’t feel bad that she murdered her stepfather, but she can’t have anyone find out. She wants to move on with her life, like date one of the hottest boys in school, Logan. But after their first date, she finds out he is not someone she wants to be around. The problem is that he has a tape of her killing her stepdad and won’t stop insisting that they are meant to be together. Delilah has to think of a way to outsmart Logan and get him to leave her alone and not snitch on her to the cops. It’s one of the hardest things she has to do.

Thoughts
I honestly thought I was going to love this book. I’ve never read a book where the unstable narrator was a stalker crazy person, so I thought it would be interesting. I was wrong. This book just wasn’t for me. From the beginning, the characters fell flat for me. I had trouble connecting with either one of them. There were times where I felt the story and both characters were unbelievable. Towards the middle/end of the book, I found myself interested in these characters and what they were doing but I still had trouble connecting with the book as a whole. A lot of the dialogue didn’t seem very natural and that made it really hard for me to connect. The ending definitely surprised me and was the reason for the 2 1/2 star rating.

Character Love.
Logan- I just couldn’t with Logan. He didn’t seem real. There was too much going on with his character.

Delilah- At times I liked Delilah, I really did, but I just wasn’t feeling it with her. I tried so hard to emotionally connect with her.

Conclusion
The Obsession just wasn’t for me. I would recommend this to people who like the stalker trope and are interested in the synopsis. If you have read it, what did you/didn’t you like about it?

This book was absolutely fantastic. I've already added it to our library collection on preorder and will recommend it to students.

Welp... there’s no way to spoil this book in a review since the story is on the cover. But I’ll put the spoilers tag on anyway.

I didn’t connect with the characters. I was initially interested because this felt like a teenage version of You by Caroline Kepnes. However, it ended up being way different. Logan has a delusional disorder. Basically he gets stuck on a belief (for this instance love and that he and Delilah are meant to be) and any fight or disagreement towards this belief is met with an unrealistic emotional response.

Delilah has too much going on. She’s at this prep school or boarding school as a day student because her dad died in an oil rig explosion. The world hates her and her mom cuz it was his fault and the oil is a huge global disaster because it’s polluting the ocean. Then she has the misfortune to bump into Logan’s crazy ass (who I forgot to mention already has a questionable history with a previous girl) boy meets girl. Boy falls in love.

Delilah mother also has a godawful abusive boyfriend that is a detective who beats on her and Delilah. One day he’s fixing his car and calls for Delilah to go get him more beer (she’s underage but ok 🙄) and on the way out she kicks the carjack and the car crushes him to death and also lays the trap for her because Logan’s crazy ass has cameras set up across the street and got it all on camera. (The cops think it was an accident so she gets away with it legally but Logan has other plans.) So he takes her on a date, they enjoy it and then he accidentally tells her he’s in love with her at the end. Dee tries to get away from him (as she should) and he follows her and shows her the video. Trapped.

The rest of the story is watching her deal with Logan inserting himself into her life and feeling trapped. Oh? Did I mention she is also a drug dealer? Yeah that’s how out of the blue that confession came in the story too. Anyways there’s been a big drug problem on this prep/boarding school campus and apparently she’s the new dealer with the librarian. To wrap this allllll up, she eventually comes up with a plan to get rid of Logan, not a second too soon because he was coming up with a plan to make her love him by destroying the evidence of her murdering the cop and then killing her so she would forever love him. Which is cool cuz she’s been drugging him for a few days trying to set him up as the drug dealer so he doesn’t blackmail her into dating him forever. Girl gets revenge.

The story ended kinda abruptly but it’s a book 1. I likely won’t be reading book 2. I don’t think I was the targeted audience for this one. And after rereading this... I guess I did put a few spoilers in it. Oops 😬

An obsessed boy, an abused girl. Who will come out on top? Delilah has been pushed to the edge by her mom's abusive boyfriend, she can't really be blamed if she finally does something about it. And no one saw a thing so no one suspects. Except Delilah has a stalker, Logan, who has been watching and filming. While he thinks this could bring them closer together, Delilah sees only a threat. One an awful lot like the one she just escaped.

This is a decent YA thriller done a bit simple. It's not sophisticated, and while that usually holds connotations, right now I really don't mean it in a bad way. It's a baby thriller and that's very very good and has a large audience. None of the really bad things happen gorily on the page ([ Even on page deaths such as Brandon are gently described, there's just a pool of blood. It had the impact of the death, but no gross outs or images that will haunt you later in a bad way (hide spoiler)]) and the reader is able to feel very safe even as the characters aren't at all. For a young audience, or even a softhearted older teen, it's a good way to experience the excitement and danger of the genre when they would not be able to handle or enjoy some of the YA dark thrillers I've read. There are plenty of high concept books for a YA audience that are really sophisticated, I do think teens as a whole enjoy very dark and complicated scenarios, but not all of them and not at every age. It's nice to have a book on the topic of dark obsessive love and obsession and abuse and revenge (prevenge?) that isn't that.

I also wouldn't really recommend it for adults who enjoy reading YA because of the lack of sophistication. I was left with a lot of questions at the end, mostly because the book chose not to follow what would be leads and foreshadowing in other books. ([I really was expecting the fact that Dee looks like Sophie to come into play. When Logan was drugged, he kept seeing Dee morph into Sophie and I thought she would be slowly wearing more makeup and looking more like her to confuse him, but unless I missed something, she didn't do that at all? It would have been interesting to have Dee pretend to be Sophie, like when Logan thought he was meeting her ghost in the glade, to get him to destroy the video. But that plot thread seemed to have been left at "is this why Logan is so psycho?". Sophie in general left me with a lot of questions. Are we supposed to take what we learn in Logan's head at face value? Was he actually friends with Sophie? If she was the previous Dee in the drug ring, don't you find it kinda weird that Lisa chose another student helper that looks almost exactly the same? I also could write another column in the "bad adulting in YA books" series about how someone at the school should have noticed that the boy previously unhealthily obsessed with one girl was very suddenly very serious with another girl. Even the most hands off counselor should see a kid who attempted suicide and warn him off of serious intense relationships for a while, right? Especially if she looks EXACTLY like the deceased object of affection? I also wondered about Detective Mendez. Delilah thinks Mendez is suspicious of her role in Brandon's death but it seemed likely that the truth was a combo of her wanting to make sure they were okay because she knew about the abuse and her trying to find out if Brandon gave any clues about the drug ring. I actually wish it had just been the one and then it could have been more explicit. (hide spoiler)]) Again, there's an appropriate audience for a simpler story that is exciting without a million twists and turns.

DNF

I only got about a third of the way through this. To me, the characters felt kind of 2-D and the writing, especially the dialogue, came off as too cliche.

The Obsession is a quick read that will keep teen and adult readers turning the pages as fast as they can! It's so well-written and really smart in the observations that makes and I definitely will be recommending it to fans of the tv show You. I enjoyed this one a great deal and really think it will find a well-deserved audience.

This was a fast-paced whip-smart thriller that I finished in one sitting. The tension between Logan and Delilah was well-balanced, and the pacing of the book never let up. Despite the dual pov, it doesn't really feel like we know either of the characters very well; just when you think you've got them understood, they turn around and do something you weren't expecting.
I'm having a bit of a tough time believing Delilah's god awful bad luck, but I suppose it's needed for the sake of the story. Other that that, everything flows well. Delilah makes a great protagonist, one that we can relate to, but also one that keeps some thoughts hidden from the reader. Logan is a quintessential villain, and his "obseesion" makes him lash out in order to help move the plot along whenver things start slacking.
Overall, it was a quick read with a high stakes cat and mouse game that I sped through!

This was so good!! I loved the plot twist and character depth! I highly recommend if you enjoy One of us is lying and The Cousins!

Thank you so much NetGalley and SOURCEBOOKs for this wonderful eARC!
The Obsession by Jesse Sutanto features a half-Singaporean girl stuck in the middle of an investigation, trying to get rid of her very own stalker and her very disturbing past. This book largely handles topics such as abuse, drugs, illegal dealings, murder, and mental illness, etc.. (the list features many many more). I was honestly very excited to read this book and it didn't let me down.

First off, I loved Delilah's character. Her character ARC was amazing and so were displays of the trauma she has been through. Not only that, but her character features the Asian race, more specifically Singaporean, which is something not commonly seen in books. I feel a twinge of sadness for what sent her spiraling downwards and her past history. Logan's character was well written. In ways, we can imagine what he is thinking, and he was obviously very well thought out. In many books, the side of the stalker and the murderer both is not highlighted, and were often left to wonder what's going through their head. This book showed both perspectives from both the characters and was fascinating.

Once again, as I had mentioned before the book almost immediately peaked my attention with its small shows of Asian heritage and customs, as well as its extremely dark plot. In honesty, I continued reading because I was amazed and intrigued at how everything continued to get worse. I continued the book. I admire the author for bringing up topics like police superiority, and its consequences like domestic violence. By the end of the book, I didn't know who to feel bad for, and who to support because all of the characters were antagonists in their own way and were individually just as messed up as the other. While the ending was quick, it left me satisfied. Honestly, the book's ending is sufficient as a standalone novel, leaving us with room to think about what might happen next but I cannot wait for the next book if there is one!

I had a fun time reading this book and I couldn’t put it down. I quickly fell in love with the main character and I enjoyed seeing how she grew throughout the story. There are some good twists that I did not see coming.

I found this so engaging! The cover and blurb for this are intriguing (although I wish I do wish it didn't reveal so much of the plot), and the book is a great length. The writing style is straightforward and engaging -- it reminds of of Karen McNamus, and I think it will appeal to fans of Pretty Little Liars, You, and similar shows. Delilah is half-Singaporean (own voices, I believe), which is an identity I don't think I've ever seen represented in YA before, and she's a really relatable character put in increasingly impossible situations. This book is super dark, with abuse, stalking, and murder, but as much as it reads like a CW show, it does deal with real issues, like police officers being perpetrators of domestic violence at a super high rate and impossible to report. I didn't expect it to go quite as dark as it did in the end, but I like how it's kind of a teen take on Crime & Punishment. I think teens will fly through this and enjoy discussing it with friends.

[I didn't review this on social media because I was considering it for YALSA's quick picks for reluctant readers].

Yikes! Seriously creepy. Nothing really new here (though maybe a little more unusual for teen fiction), but very well done. I absolutely will recommend this to my teens at my library.

I would like to think NetGalley for an e-book ARC of The Obessison by Jesse Q. Sutanto. If you are a fan of thrillers or a true crime buff I have one thing to say about this novel: GO READ IT. The plot was wonderfully executed with the underlining theme of what lengths will you go to get what you want or to save yourself. The alternating points of view from stalker and v ictim, gave this novel the thrill of a great crime show. My biggest problem is the ending I wish there had been an epilogue.
3.5 out of 5 stars.

I am torn about this book. On the one hand it is very engaging, fast-paced, and certainly thrilling. On the other hand it reminds of the TV show You, and I hate that show. However, this book does what I wish that show would do, in that it gets the girl being stalked to fight back. It is overall a very strong debut, and although I was expecting it to hit harder with some of it's themes, I enjoyed that it was also just a simple thriller. So I'm not sure where that leaves my feelings. I liked it, but I didn't love it. I still think the author's next books would be worth reading though.