Wow this is in my opinion Janelle Brown's best book yet!!!!!! It shows you in depth looks into the relationships between twins that you don't normally understand unless you are a twin. I can't say enough great things about this book so I will leave you with this: I thoroughly enjoyed this book and I promise you will t0o!!!!!!!

I'll Be You is the story of twin sisters, Sam and Elli, who grew up as child actors playing twins on screen and each other in real life. As they grew up the hardships of life hit each of them differently - Sam has been dealing with addiction while Elli has faced the challenges of infertility and the effects of that on her marriage. They've grown apart and lost their connection to each other. Until their father calls Sam out of the blue to come help watch Elli's daughter while Elli is on a retreat in Ojai. As Sam arrives at her parents house she quickly starts to realize that Elli's life is nothing like what she imagined and it seems like things are not ok....

I love love loved this book by Janelle Brown - I fell in love with the characters and anything with a women's empowerment culty vibe is absolutely for me. Janelle Brown never disappoints and this is no exception. The twists and turns kept me engaged and guessing!

Thank you to Netgalley and Random House for the ARC - I'll Be You is out now!

I wanted to read I’ll Be You after enjoying Janelle Brown’s book Pretty Things last year.

Pick up I’ll Be You if you are drawn to books about twins, child stars, or cults.

I loved the opening paragraphs of I’ll Be You and was immediately invested in Ellie and Sam’s sister relationship. I was engaged in Sam’s quest to find answers as a mystery unfolds upon her return to her family home. The twin relationship, backstory of the lives of childhood actresses, and examination of shame and addiction all held my interest.

If you are triggered by infertility or addiction, I would skip this book, as both play major roles in the novel. (I can see where the infertility storyline could especially upset readers for reasons I won’t go into to prevent spoilers.)

I appreciate that Janelle Brown’s writing holds my attention and keeps the pages turning. I will continue to read her entertaining novels and need to check out her backlist.

This review is also posted on Goodreads @Michelle Beginandendwithbooks and on Instagram and Facebook @beginandendwithbooks

I loved Janelle Brown’s last novel Pretty Things, so I couldn’t wait to read I’ll Be You. It did not disappoint.

This is more a slow burning character study that kept me riveted and wondering what would happen next.

Here’s what I liked:
👯‍♀️ the main characters, Sam and Elli, are identical twins but with different personalities and interests
👯‍♀️ The twins are childhood tv stars. I enjoyed the peek behind the Hollywood curtain.
👯‍♀️ POVs - we get both Sam’s and Elli’s points of view. Sam narrates the first half of the book and Elli narrates the second half.
👯‍♀️ there’s a cult!
👯‍♀️a fun, quick, and entertaining read

Review of I’ll Be You by Janelle Brown

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

This is my first book by this author but it won’t be my last. I enjoyed it thoroughly and liked the writing style. I found the characters really interesting snd the story was solid. I feel it could have been somewhat shorter but overall no major complaints. I listened to it on audio and definitely recommend that.

Quick synopsis: Sam and Elli are identical twins who are former B list child stars. As adults they have become estranged. Sam has struggled with substance abuse and Elli is married with an adopted child. Sam gets a call from their father asking for her help with the niece she knew nothing about. Apparently Elli and her husband have separated and Elli has gone to a spa retreat and keeps extending her stay. Sam quickly becomes suspicious that Elli may have actually joined a cult and Sam is determined to get to the bottom of it and bring her home.

Thank you so much to @netgalley and @prhaudio for the advanced copies of this one! This book was out yesterday.

I'll Be You by Janelle Brown

Two young girls, identical twins, are approached on a beach and soon after, they are child-stars!
One loves the spotlight, one doesn't. But, she loves her sister, so she agrees to keep on acting. Until one day it is too hard, a harmless idea forms—just for now. I'll Be You. It will help both of them.

A few years later, one has made life changing choices that the other hasn't.

Later still, they are adults. One gets married and desperately wants a baby.
One has been to rehab-and needs to go again after thinking she is helping her sister. She's done it before. No one will know.
Their relationship ends.

Until, it is a year out of rehab for Sam and their parents need help taking care of Charlotte. "Who is Charlotte?" Sam asks.
Elli's daughter.
"Where's Elli?" No one really knows. Elli isn't answering her phone. Sam talks to a neighbor and gets concerned. She investigates and an idea forms. She's done it before. She can do it again. But this time it might be dangerous.

I'll Be You by Janelle Brown is a highly recommended 5 star book. You won't be able to stop reading this suspenseful book and you won't be able to solve what has happened! Great, great book! ENJOY!

"Identical twins, so identical that even their parents can't always tell them apart.
Child-stars, best friends. No one knows who is who. The same but different. Almost like they are one person...Clear your schedule! I'll Be You is hard to put down!"
-Books and Pens on Green Gables

I was given this book to read and review. Thank you!

RATING: 2⭐/5
There are SOME spoilers in this review (because I couldn’t give an honest opinion without spoiling something).
TRIGGER WARNINGS: very explicit descriptions of being in a cult, drugs, addiction, kidnapping

⭐ FULL REVIEW: I was very curious about this book because the premise sounded incredibly promising. The book started off really great, and Sam was an incredibly engaging character who was so easy to root for, but I couldn’t help but feel like it fell a little flat for me, especially from the half-way point. There were many times I almost put this book down, but my curiosity as to how it all were to end won out. This is labeled as a family drama, and for the most part, it is, but we only really get to see the complex relationship between the twins during the flashbacks. There weren’t exactly a lot of scenes of them together in the present time until the very end, which was pretty disappointing.

If anything, there was more (current) drama between one of the main characters, Sam, and their mother. There were quite a few things that irked me about this book but the biggest one was how it completely derailed at about 50% of the book, when we now had the POV of Elli. That was when it started going from a supposed thriller/family drama to nothing more than a glorified cult documentary. I get it, we had to delve into Elli’s point of view to fully understand what she went through, but it was just… completely straying from the plot of the book, in my opinion. I just wanted to shake Elli to tell her that you didn’t need this cult to be more self-aware. Therapy’s right there. As the more “sensible” twin, you’d have thought she’d know that, but for the sake of the plot, she had to go there.

I think a lot of the characters in this book are just absolutely frustrating. Sam and Elli’s mother is at the top of that list, and every time she comes into the picture, I bristle. That’s how unlikeable she is, and even when I finished the book, I still didn’t like her. The pacing of the book was all over the place and I think another thing that really irked me was that the whole “figuring out where Elli went” was part of the “thriller” aspect of the book, but then they gave away the answer to that in what seems like a very quick manner, because the plot had to delve into the “cult” aspect of it.

To say that I wasn’t truly interested in the cult aspect of it is an understatement, and the fact that the author took so much time to state all the happenings in it explicitly was just incredibly disturbing. I didn’t really get thriller vibes from this book at all. If anything, I think the author might have used the cult plot to be the ‘thriller’ part of it, but it just felt like a family drama that was blown completely out of proportion to force it to be a thriller, hence leaving me completely disappointed and very weirded out. Don’t even get me started about the fact that there was a kidnapping involved. I literally sat there reading, thinking “This is just… ridiculous.” It felt like a very cheap shot at shock value.

The ending was pretty dissatisfying, in my opinion, and there were only two redeeming qualities for this book. One is the superb writing, because even though the plot completely derailed and I was no longer interested, starting from Elli’s POV, it was still written very beautifully. The other redeeming quality really is Sam herself. She’s such a wonderful character and she’s the only reason that this book isn’t a 1 star. I was rooting for her through and through, and am so glad she got her well-deserved happy ending, at least.

📖 WOULD RECOMMEND TO: People who somehow like really weird (?) family dramas / “thrillers” but to be completely honest, I wouldn’t really recommend this to people at all.

There were so many aspects in the synopsis of I’ll Be You that I was really drawn to and knew I had to read it.

Identical twins, child TV stars, missing twin, and finally… cult(?!). Each item sounded fun, but all of them together in one story..? Oh my! So intriguing.

And this book definitely didn’t disappoint. I was all in from the beginning. It was a hard book to put down. Especially near the end. I flew through the last section reading as fast as possible to find out what in the heck…? SO good. And SO bizarre.

I’ve read a couple of Janelle Brown’s previous books and loved them so knew I absolutely had to read her newest release. And what a ride it was. I can’t wait to see what she comes up with next.

*Thank you so much to Random House and NetGalley for the advance copy!*

I loved this book! It kept me reading nonstop for two days just like it’s predecessor, Pretty Things! Loved the combination of the child actor and cult storylines plus a redeeming ending. Have already recommended to several friends!

I'LL BE YOU by Janelle Brown is about Sam, a former child actress and recovering alcoholic, who is called to her parents' house to help care for her young niece while her twin sister, Elli, is away on a retreat. With sparse communication from Elli and an absence that keeps getting stretched longer, Sam looks into the woman's empowerment group that Elli has joined and discovers it might be more sinister than it looks on the surface.

The book is well written and hits on a lot of interesting themes, like the nature vs. nurture debate and at what point groupthink or belief in a higher power becomes harmful. It also delves into the nature of sacrifice and how we determine what and how much is acceptable to sacrifice for a loved one. Sam is a compelling character throughout the first half of the novel as she searches for her estranged twin and battles her inner demons and the regrets of her past.

However, the story is slow to get started. While the pace and intensity build throughout the first half, the second half slows down to a crawl until the final climactic moment. While the book is marketed as a fast-paced thriller, it reads more like a family drama with vaguely spooky elements.

3.5 ⭐️‘s
How nice would it be if we each had someone that looked just like us to step in for us when life becomes too much to handle. That’s exactly what has happened throughout the lives of identical twins, Sam and Elli. Discovered by a Hollywood agent when they were young, the girls were quickly well known for the TV show they were starring in. Sam loved the attention and limelight, while Elli much preferred the quiet life. When the twins hit their late teens Elli finally broke up the duo and quit, only to have Sam crash and burn without her and leaving them both on their own for the first time. Years later Elli is in trouble and Sam needs to use all that she has to save her from the clutches of the cult Elli is embedded in. It will take all of her cunningness to save her, and get a second chance to once again share the bond they lost along the way.

Sam and Elli are identical twins whose parents couldn't always tell apart and had been B-list child actors. When their careers ended, Elli became the perfect housewife and Sam became addicted to pills and alcohol. The twins haven't spoken in years until Sam's father calls and tells her that Elli's husband left, they had adopted a two-year-old, and Elli stopped answering her phone after going to a spa. Is Elli headed for a breakdown or is this something more?

Janelle Brown writes about very complicated relationships between women, and this book is certainly no different. What could be more complicated than identical twins who used to pretend to be each other finally living very different lives? We start with Sam's POV, a year sober, and asked to look after Elli's daughter. As she recalls the shared past of acting in Hollywood and the start of her addiction, we get to see how different the twins are, for all of the minor physical differences they had. Things don't add up, however; Elli wasn't the type to go to a spa, she isn't responding to texts or calls, and a lot of personal documents had gone missing when Sam started looking for them. By the time Sam seriously starts looking for Elli, I was hooked.

The tropes of childhood stars burning out, twins being each other or having a secret language, and the willful disbelief in problems are all at play here. On top of that is the introduction of a cult that preys on wealthy dissatisfied women, purchasing individual or group sessions to achieve levels of enlightenment. The realization that was the problem is slow, but I do want to point this out for cult survivors or those sensitive to such predatory tactics. I was thoroughly invested in Sam's search and tortured love for her sister, and the feeling of emptiness without her. Finding Elli ultimately allows both of them to reclaim the selves they had become and forge a new path together. It's a fascinating story, and one I couldn't put down.

This was a fun read with enjoyable characters and a twisty plot. Not my favorite book by this author, but a fun thriller nonetheless.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/58678420

“Get Sam to help you. She’ll know what to do. She’ll get it.”

When Ellie extends her impromptu spa weekend by weeks, her babysitting mother is just desperate enough to grab this curiously confident recommendation for a sister they haven't seen in nearly a year. A sister with a long habit of drug and alcohol use. A sister with no known experience with children.

Janelle Brown’s I’ll Be You is the story of Sam and Ellie, who, as children, were two halves of a perfect whole: gorgeous identical twins whose parents sometimes couldn’t even tell them apart. But as adults, their lives have splintered. After leaving acting, Ellie reinvented herself as the perfect homemaker. Meanwhile, Sam has never recovered from her failed Hollywood career, or from her addiction to the pills and booze that have propped her up for the last fifteen years. And now Ellie is -maybe?- missing.

While I wouldn’t characterize I’ll Be You as a thriller, Sam’s search for her sister, both physically and spiritually, is a quick, fun read. Perfect for a light reading in the park while watching the kids play on the swings.

I received my copy of I’ll Be You as an advanced reader copy from NetGalley, but this perfect summer read is available to you anywhere you purchase books on April 26, 2022.

Janelle Brown is turning into an auto-read author for me when it comes to thrillers. Her writing is solid and her books seem to always have such gorgeous covers. I really enjoyed I'll Be You. It helped that it had one of my plotline buzzwords...cults! I am a sucker for any books about cults.

Emmi and Sam are identical twins and former child stars. They have become estranged over the years and took very different paths in life. Sam was wrapped up in drugs and alcohol, but is now in recovery, while Emmi went the family route. When Sam gets a call from her parents to help care for her sister's adopted daughter while Emmi is on a weekend retreat, things start to get strange.

I'll Be You has elements of Hollywood, struggles of child stars, substance abuse/addiction and recovery, as well as manipulation by cult-like groups that take advantage of people. This was a solid thriller and the backstory of Emmi and Sam's life as child stars added a really interesting element to the story. I tend to like a twin trope in thrillers and I thought this was nicely done. Plenty of tension, twists and cliffhangers, I did not see much of the story coming. Solid 4 stars for me.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Random House for gifting me a digital ARC of the latest thriller by Janelle Brown - 4.5 stars rounded up for a book that was hard to put down!

Identical twins, Elli and Sam looked so much alike that they frequently changed identities for their child acting jobs, in social situations, and even their parents couldn't always tell them apart. But their personalities varied - Elli tried hard to be the perfect child and later the perfect adult and was much more introverted. Sam loved the spotlight and faced her demons of pills and alcohol. After a major fight between the two, Sam hasn't spoken to Elli in over a year and is shocked to learn that she adopted a toddler and is off on a retreat, leaving Charlotte with their parents. Sam is worried about Elli's disappearance and starts investigating.

This book was told from both Elli's and Sam's points of view, in both the past and present, so we see how their childhood experiences shaped them. I was fascinated with the group that Elli got involved with, GenFem, which bore a very similar resemblance to the NXIVM cult. Both characters were fully formed and you will get invested in both storylines. Great read!

Thanks to NetGalley, Random House Canada and Janelle Brown. This book was so good and it took me forever to read. It read to me like a tv series or a movies and it made it so interesting that I forced me to take my time while reading as I did not want to miss anything. The relationship with the twins was wild right from the start and I was wide eye reading it the entire time. I even liked parts that I found that were used as fillers...if you read the book..you would understand. It worked for the book though. I recommend this book.

Rating: 4

The synopsis along with the title are what really made me interested in this book. While I love the colors on the cover I don’t feel like the cover sells the story well. If it wasn’t for the title I would have just kept scrolling and wouldn’t have clicked to find out more. It’s no secret so many of us judge a book by its cover but this is a good example as to why you should still give those books a chance.

This book ended up surprising me because I enjoyed it way more than I thought I would. I think it really helped that right away I connected with Sam’s character. I liked that she was broken, twisted, and struggling with her addiction and doing the right things in life. I liked Elli’s character as well but I definitely enjoyed the POV of Sam way more. The first half of the book is told from Sam’s POV in the present day with flashbacks from the twins' childhood. The second half of the book follows Elli’s POV and also includes a few flashback chapters. Personally, I think the second half could have been shorter but that could have just been a me thing. I enjoyed the writing style and found the story to have a nice flow. I do think the pacing could have been a little bit better. There are several slow points in the story but stick with it because all together the book was good.

Overall, I would definitely recommend this one. However, don’t go into it expecting a full thriller. While it had thrilling aspects I would say it was more of a mystery/adult fiction. From the beginning I had fun coming up with all kinds of weird theories for what was truly going on. This is also one of those books where it's extremely important to connect with the characters. If you don’t connect with at least one of them then I don’t think you will enjoy the story.

𝐈’𝐥𝐥 𝐁𝐞 𝐘𝐨𝐮 𝐑𝐞𝐯𝐢𝐞𝐰 🌴

Happy Pub Day 🎉 @janellebrownie

𝗣𝘂𝗯𝗹𝗶𝘀𝗵𝗲𝗿: @randomhouse
𝐆𝐞𝐧𝐫𝐞: Thriller/Mystery
𝐑𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

𝑻𝒉𝒐𝒖𝒈𝒉𝒕𝒔:
This is my second book by Brown — I thought this was another gripping story with great characters.

I enjoy stories that deal with twins and I am a fan of reading about cults. This book kept me interested from start to finish.

I can be judgmental about books that take place in LA but I really enjoyed the atmospheric setting of the now and then - Santa Barbra, Hollywood and Ojai.

Both sisters 👯‍♀️ POVs were told beautifully. It was easy to understand both of their perspectives and I could relate with their brokenness.

Thank you @netgalley & @randomhouse for my ARC of I’ll Be You 💖 #Netgalley #RandomHouse #IllBeYou #JanelleBrown

This book—I gobbled it up. It is well done character driven suspense. Janelle Brown, I’ll Be You introduces readers to former child-star twins that get into trouble in Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, and the desert— it’s absolutely delectable. The author was masterful in bringing complex relationships between women to fruition. A theme in the narrative is also about understanding that sometimes two things can be equally true even if they’re complicated. I’m impressed at how creative and crisp this storyline was and readers will find themselves absorbed into the world that the author created! Highly recommend this novel! I’LL BE YOU is a synergistic blend of psychological suspense, character analysis, the dark side of the “self help” culture, and an intriguing cult thriller premise in this must-read novel!