Sunday, July 26, 2026

You Know What You Did by K. T. Nguyen

 

This is not a particularly good book. The POV character--there's really just the one until the very end--is struggling so hard with mental illness that it's impossible to take any of her reported perceptions exactly literally, she's not primarily delusional but her perceptions are violently skewed. The novel takes like 170 of like 350 pages to get to what's arguably the inciting event, though there's a plausible reading it's not. It jumps around in time between at least three timelines, with some of those juddering and skipping between present and past. The characters aren't all that interesting or likeable, most of them seem really shallow and one-note. The prose is pretty solid; that and the fact that it's not endless twists (there's just the one and it mainly works because the POV is so limited) are the extent of the good I can muster, here. The author is clearly coming from a place of pain and writing about things very important to her, but much of this is just a jumbled scream.

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You Know What You Did by K. T. Nguyen

  This is not a particularly good book. The POV character--there's really just the one until the very end--is struggling so hard with me...