Rant Review: "The Perfect Girlfriend" by Karen Hamilton

Quick Summary

Type: Novel

Genre: Thriller, mystery, suspense

Back Cover: "YOU’VE NEVER READ A LOVE STORY AS TWISTED AS THIS.

Juliette loves Nate.

She will follow him anywhere. She’s even become a flight attendant for his airline so she can keep a closer eye on him.

They are meant to be.

The fact that Nate broke up with her six months ago means nothing. Because Juliette has a plan to win him back.

She is the perfect girlfriend. And she’ll make sure no one stops her from getting exactly what she wants.

True love hurts, but Juliette knows it’s worth all the pain..."

Read Time: 8 days

Rating: 1.25 stars

Review

This story is so hard to get into. I understand that this is a story with an unreliable narrator, but it is so obvious this woman is not to be trusted. And maybe I wouldn't mind so much, but this woman is exhausting. I could get behind an unreliable narrator if they were entertaining, but this main character is not entertaining in the least.

In fact, that was the big problem with this book. It was so incredibly boring. Thrillers cannot be boring. A boring thriller is a bad thriller.

So much of the story was about Juliette's job as a flight attendant. That could have been interesting if this had been a story about a flight attendant navigating the ins and outs of their job, culminating in an actual emergency. But this was supposed to be about a woman stalking her boyfriend.

At the same time, Juliette is obsessed with Bella, an old schoolmate of hers. Eventually I figured out why, but until that point, and frankly beyond that point, Juliette's obsession with Bella gets a little repetitive. There's rarely anything new, just an overall jealousness expressed in exactly the same way over and over again.

Now the flashbacks. There are a ton of flashbacks. Some are okay; when Juliette flashes back to her school days to talk about Bella's treatment of her and having sex for the first time, it makes sense in the story. But the flashbacks to her childhood with Amelia and William? Less great. I guess it's supposed to make Juliette more sympathetic? But it just detracts from the overall story and really drags down the plot.

Finally, the twists. The big twist I guessed the second I figured out that Nate was Bella's sister. So Nate was the first guy she had sex with? Yeah, super predictable and kind of boring. The second twist was probably Tara's murder, but this is a thriller. Someone had to die. Frankly, I hoped Juliette would kill Nate, but I guess I wasn't that lucky. I also hoped that eventually the police would catch up to her - either for the murder or for literally kidnapping Nate - but still, no luck (by the way, she imprisoned Nate and got away with it because she threatened to report him for statutory rape? He's not that much older than her, they were both in school, and it was consensual - aren't there some kind of Romeo and Juliette laws in the UK that would deal with that? Plus, his family is loaded. They'd be able to afford a lawyer and get him cleared of all charges, with the charges expunged from his record probably.)

Finally, the last twist - about William's death - was just so disappointing. I thought we'd learn that Juliette purposefully drowned William. Instead, the twist is that she acted like a child (she was a child) and panicked instead of immediately trying to save William. Like I said, disappointing and a waste of pages.