A thriller with a MC that really worked my last nerve. She seemed kind of whiny to me, but redeemed herself in the end. I liked th element where you weren’t quite sure if this was all in her head or if it was truly physically happening! I do think the book could’ve been shorter, but the twist was worth it in the end. I gave this 3.5 stars.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC in exchange for my honest opinion.

I found #youknowwhatyoudid to be as overwrought as its main character, Annie Shaw. Goodness the rabbit holes we go down, with Annie as self-centered as she can be. Her childhood was incredibly traumatic so I get why she's such a fragile adult, and why the line between reality and imagination blurs. Yet, the times she does show strength are hard to believe and incongruous. Tiresome and tiring.

P.S. Thanks to #netgalley for the ARC.

What a dark journey through Annie's mental illness and her toxic/codependent relationship with her mother. From the beginning, I suspected certain things were happening and who was behind them. That did not detract from the story at all. Annie's journey is the whole point of the story, not who did it. Annie is a hero.

Annie’s perfectly tailored life has unraveled after her mom dies. Her mom was a Vietnam War refugee and had her own demons. After her mom’s death Annie’s OCD reappears and with it her life spins out of control. There are a lot of twists and turns here so I don’t want to give much away but this was a solid debut. I’m excited to see what she writes next.

I loved the beginning of this book, then the pace slowed down and crawled slower than a slug. I just found it hard to get past the super slow pace. This book had so much potential, but overall just ended up not being my cup of tea.

Anh Le, aka Annie, is a first generation American. Her mother escaped Vietnam while she was pregnant. Growing up was difficult because her mom had some mental health issues and they were quite poor. Now Annie is married to Duncan, a prize winning journalist. They have one daughter, Tabitha, who is 15 and Annie is battling her own mental health issues. AFter Annie's mother dies suddenly, her emotional support dog dies things start to fall apart for Annie. I never knew if what I was reading was real or part of Annie's delusions. It was a longish book at 384 pages and it started to feel repetitive and I started to skim. None of the characters were the least bit likeable but they all seemed to smell great. Maybe I would have seen the end coming if I cared enough.

I would like to thank Netgalley and Penguin Dutton for providing me with a digital copy.

I almost stopped reading this multiple times because of Annie’s daughter. Other than that, it was a great thriller that told the story of immigrant families, the toll being a refugee has on one’s mental health, generational trauma, assimilation, racism, and finding yourself after being a wife and mother for so long.

This book is intense! I absolutely loved it.
There were so many elements to this story that made it so unique, and that’s so hard in the thriller genre.
Ann just lost her mother and basically from there her life goes down an absolutely insane spiral.
There are many mental health issues with the characters. I feel like mental health was almost a character of its very own in this book. I enjoyed that aspect of the story, and felt like it really brought something different to this read.
I recommend this 100% ! 4.5 stars!
Thank you NetGalley for the ARC!

Annie’s perfectly tailored life has unraveled after her mom dies. Her mom was a Vietnam War refugee and had her own demons. After her mom’s death Annie’s OCD reappears and with it her life spins out of control. There are a lot of twists and turns here so I don’t want to give much away but this was a solid debut. I’m excited to see what she writes next.
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Thank you #Dutton and #NetGalley for an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.

This was a great debut! There were a lot of layers to this novel: generational trauma, refugee trauma, exposure trauma and interpersonal trauma. The portrayal of OCD was raw and truly made you empathize with the main female character. The depths of the illness were exposed in a manner that resonated. The author also touched upon the mother and daughter relationship which can be tumultuous and beautiful.

This was a slow burn, that gave little Easter eggs throughout to lead you to the ending. When the last egg dropped, it was predictable in my opinion, but also really fitting, it made so much sense.

Even though this one took me a little longer to get through. I really enjoyed it. I was selective in when I read this one because I wanted to give it the proper attention. (I’ve realized I’m more of a mood reader than I thought!)

If you like novels that touch on refugee trauma, ptsd and mental illness, this one is for you!

Thank you netgalley and Dutton publishing for the ARC!

Rating: 4 ⭐️
Pub Date: April 16, 2024
How I Read It: 📱

Synopsis
When Annie’s elderly mother passes away suddenly, her whole world starts to spiral downward and her compulsions start taking over her life. When her friend goes missing, things start getting even stranger and Annie has to start second guessing the type of person she is.

My Thoughts
The first part of the book was confusing (it was meant to be that way), slow, and really hard for me to get through. I was wondering where the book was going, it didn’t seem at all like a thriller. Then I got to the second part which starts off strong, and I was binge reading the last 70% off the book in one afternoon. At this point, the thriller begins and Annie starts hallucinating after a friend goes missing. We know that Annie is carrying on her mother’s mental illness after suffering from a lifetime of mental abuse from her mother, but has it really damaged Annie to the point where she would murder somebody? I have to be honest, I did not see the ending coming, it threw me for a loop and was really good!

Final Thoughts
I liked this book a lot! If you like thrillers, it’s different and worth the read. If you suffer from anxiety and bad OCD, this may not be the book for you. Reading about Annie’s anxiety was giving me anxiety.

❗️Of Note
📝 Family Drama
📝 Death
📝 Cheating / Affairs
📝 Anxiety / OCD / Paranoia / Mysophobia

Themes:
🔪 Psychological Thriller

Ratings
Characters: 5 ⭐️
Pace: 3.5 ⭐️
Enjoyability: 4 ⭐️
Narrator: N/A

Thank you to PENGUIN GROUP Dutton | Dutton and NetGalley for an advanced copy of this book!

At the beginning it was definitely thrilling and you're wanting to know more and can't put it down but by the half way mark it just died down, slow paced then towards the end it got so rushed. I really wanted to love this but it wasn't paced right and the plot fell through. Thank you for this arc!

This was a solid psychological thriller up until the end! As a first generation Vietnamese daughter, the premise intrigued me and I felt like I could relate with what Annie had gone through with her mother. While I did have an inkling of what the ending was, there were plenty of moments where I questioned who was actually involved. I love an unreliable narrator so that really added to the mystery. I do think the ending was a touch rushed but still enjoyed this book.

Thank you to NetGalley & PENGUIN GROUP Dutton for the opportunity to read this wonderful debut by K. T. Nguyen. While I was not too sure where the story was going at times, (Was this a slice-of-life book about a troubled family? Is the narrator unreliable?) I was pleasantly surprised by the turn this took about 50% of the way through. Giving this 4 stars due to some language choices (the phrase “profile pic” took me out of the immersion of the story), and the first half of the story to set up Annie as a potentially unreliable narrator could have been condensed just a bit. Other than that I could not put this book down after the halfway point!

For years I’ve been searching for the right term to describe a novel like K.T. Nguyen’s You Know What You Did.

It’s easy to bandy around terms like “domestic thriller,” “suspense,” but their broadness doesn’t capture the nuance, the distinct brand of books like this.

Instead, for a while now, I’ve turned to the terms “popcorn thriller” and “instagram thriller,” at least in my household, where I can trap my wife while she’s putting in her contacts and force her to listen to me explain what exactly I mean.

The rest of the world, thankfully, escapes this torture, so I’ve been left searching for a more universal description.

Until…last week.

I can’t remember who gave me the idea; it was likely my wife, this time five months pregnant with nowhere to go while I rambled on about Nguyen’s debut novel; but someone said, “Sounds like a Reese thriller.”

Et voila! The Reese thriller.

What I love about this is, if you’ve read more than 2 of Reese’s Book Club selections, you know they contain that vibe. That certain je ne sais quoi that goes beyond normal descriptors like thriller, domestic thriller, suspense.

Thus, likely, when I say that You Know What You Did is a Reese thriller, you know what to expect: Domestic suspense, potential unreliable narrator, murder, relational drama. And a perspective we don’t often get in publishing. In the case of Nguyen’s debut, it’s the reality of being a Vietnam war refugee. Not just the experience, but the generational trauma that haunts a family decades following it.

Important to call out that YKWYD was not a Reese’s Book Club selection, which is maybe why I liked it. No shade to my Nashville neighbor Reese, but our literary Venn diagrams don’t often overlap, the last being RF Kuang’s Yellowface, which was a top 10 for me last year. Similar to YF, YKWYD does two important things that most thrillers miss out on:

1. Round characters
2. Clear motives

So often I’m annoyed by modern thriller writers (not naming names, sorry) for sacrificing character development and unforced story for the sake of plot, pace, and surprise. But I so appreciate Nguyen for being able to do it all. I couldn’t put this down in the third act, doing something I’ve never done: reading the ebook while making my morning coffee.

An absolute Certified Unputdownable™️, this was easily 👁️👁️👁️👁️/5. I’d highly recommend for any beach vacation you have this summer.

Unfortunately, this book was not for me. The book was a little slower than what I like for thrillers, and the reveal/ending was predictable so it did not feel like a good pay off for the slower pace. I did enjoy seeing the generational effects of the mother daughter relationship, and seeing Annie's relationship with her daughter evolve. I was a little confused by the timeline because the book jumps back and forth and at times I am not sure whether I am in the present, past, or future. Overall, I struggled to finish this and was left underwhelmed by the ending.

This is a psychological thriller, who-done-it kind of book so I really can’t say much in way of the storyline, but I will say the outcome is not what I was expecting. Unfortunately, I found it a little confusing at times. I would say this is best read when you have longer time spans to read vs reading 15 minutes here and there. Overall, I think this was a good story, especially knowing it’s the author’s debut book.

Thank you to NetGalley and Dutton for the complimentary copy of this book. As always, the opinions expressed within this review are completely my own.

I love a good unreliable narrator, but this book was disturbing. It had a lot of gross things included and some animal death. I have a hard time reading books that contain animal death and wasn’t expecting it, so I think it should be listed as a trigger warning.

Thank you Dutton / Netgalley, #partner, for the advanced e-copy of You Know What You Did in exchange for my honest review.

You all know how I love my debuts and this one was so incredibly written, with a personal touch that I think really enhanced the authenticity of the writing. This is one stressful, addicting book and I loved it!

Once I saw the comps for this book, it being for fans of Lisa Jewell and Celeste Ng, I just knew I had to read this one, and I was not in any way disappointed. This book grabbed me from the get-go and I found myself on the edge of my seat the entire time. It’s not too often we read about obsessive-compulsive disorder, a disorder I find utterly fascinating in and of itself, so right away I was so intrigued with Annie’s character. I loved that the book is told completely from her perspective. It definitely made for some stressful times, for sure, but I don’t think the book would have had the same impact any other way. You really feel that anxiety that she feels in certain situations – it truly comes off the page and this is where knowing the author herself has OCD comes into play. That authenticity really shines through.

I also loved that at times, Annie come across as unreliable so you aren’t ever sure if she is completely trustworthy. This makes you wonder if the story you are getting is believable or not and I just loved this as it really kept me on my toes, wondering what was really happening and needing to filter out what was real and what if anything was not. This is not a fast-paced book by any means and yet I could not put it down once I started it. I was so invested in Annie’s story, needing to know how things would be resolved. I loved the fact that the phrase “you know what you did” is repeated through-out…it comes into play in a big way and had me questioning just what Annie had done and when we would find out.

I cannot recommend this book enough. It’s the perfect mix of a psychological thriller with just a hint of horror elements mixed in. For a debut novel, K.T. Nguyen knocked it out of the park with this one and I cannot wait to see what she writes next!

Annie is a Vietnamese artist tormented by memories of her troubled childhood which resulted in a mother with mental illness and it manifests itself in OCD in Annie and a difficulty connecting with her own teenage daughter. Then, when a patron of her artwork is murdered, the question is asked….did Annie do it or has her mothers ghost come back to get her revenge on Annie for the wrongs she felt done to her before she died.
Annie is an unreal character due to her personal demons and her mental illness but it got a little repetitive as her inner monologue constantly behaved as if she was a killer.
While I was initially intrigued by the story, and the many different ways the author was able to use the phrase “you know what you did “ eventually I started to get bored. It took too long for the thriller part to kick in and when it did it felt like it didn’t connect with the rest of the story. It just didn’t flow. Maybe it’s just that it took too long to get there that I lost interest in what happened by that point. Either way, it could have been better but it ended up being just meh.
Thank you to Dutton Books and NetGalley for this eArc in exchange for my review.