You Again: A Novel
3.5/5
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About this ebook
A New York Times Best Thriller of 2020 * Shortlisted for the Strand Magazine Best Mystery Novel Award * Finalist for the Gotham Book Prize
From Edgar Award nominee Debra Jo Immergut, a taut, twisting work of suspense about a woman haunted by her younger self
Abigail Willard first spots her from the back of a New York cab: the spitting image of Abby herself at age twenty-two—right down to the silver platforms and raspberry coat she wore as a young artist with a taste for wildness. But the real Abby is now forty-six and married, with a corporate job and two kids. As the girl vanishes into a rainy night, Abby is left shaken. Was this merely a hallucinatory side effect of working-mom stress? A message of sorts, sent to remind her of passions and dreams tossed aside? Or something more explosive and life-altering?
As weeks go by, Abby continues to spot her double around her old New York haunts—and soon, despite her better instincts, Abby finds herself tailing her look-alike. She is dogged by a nagging suspicion that there is a deeper mystery to figure out, one rooted far in her past. All the while, Abby’s life starts to slip from her control: her marriage hits major turbulence, her teenage son drifts into a radical movement that portends a dark coming era. When her elusive double presents her with a dangerous proposition, Abby must decide how much she values the life she’s built, and how deeply she knows herself.
You Again is an audaciously constructed novel, an unboxing of memory, desire, and regret—and an electrifying portrait of a woman hurtling toward a key crossroads in her life, where a secret lies buried like an undetonated bomb.
Debra Jo Immergut
Debra Jo Immergut is the author of the Edgar-nominated novel The Captives and the story collection Private Property. She has been awarded a MacDowell fellowship and a Michener fellowship. Her literary work has been published in American Short Fiction and Narrative. As a journalist, she has been a frequent contributor to the Wall Street Journal and the Boston Globe. She has an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.
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Reviews for You Again
12 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5There is the supernatural at work in this book. Abigail, 45, encounters a younger version of herself at 22, who goes by the name of A. Abigail tries to warn A of the problems ahead. For me there was just too much going on to make a cohesive story line.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Abigail is on her way home from work one evening when she sees a young woman on the sidewalk. She's wearing the same pink thrift store coat that Abigail wore in her early twenties and when Abigail gets out of her taxi for a closer look, she realizes that she's seeing herself, twenty years younger. This glimpse of her past sends her into a closer look at her current life - then she was preparing to go to art school with the intention of living solely for her art, but now she's the art designer for a pharmaceutical company, deciding on the exact shade of lavender to use in the packaging for a new drug, or working on the precise shades of pink to use for a brochure illustration of the digestive system. As her sightings of her former self become more frequent and she begins to interact with her, her life begins to spin out of control, the carefully constructed security she's built become less satisfying. At the same time, one of her sons is becoming involved in an antifa group, putting Abigail's values into question and putting her in the path of a seemingly nice police detective. I'm not sure what exactly was going on for much of this and the possible explanations trotted out at the end of the novel weren't convincing to me. But there's no question that the author had me reading as fast as I could, trying to keep up with the twists and the rapid pace of events. And despite my finding some of the central events utterly unbelievable, this didn't stop me from enjoying the wild ride this novel took me on, which is to say that Immergut has constructed a clever bunch of inter-connected plots and kept them all from falling apart, resulting in a novel that is more entertaining than most.