Rave Review: "When No One is Watching" by Alyssa Cole

Quick Summary

Type: Novel

Genre: Thriller, mystery, horror

Back Cover: "Sydney Green is Brooklyn born and raised, but her beloved neighborhood seems to change every time she blinks. Condos are sprouting like weeds, FOR SALE signs are popping up overnight, and the neighbors she's known all her life are disappearing. To hold onto her community's past and present, Sydney channels her frustration into a walking tour and finds an unlikely and unwanted assistant in one of the new arrivals to the block--her neighbor Theo.

But Sydney and Theo's deep dive into history quickly becomes a dizzying descent into paranoia and fear. Their neighbors may not have moved to the suburbs after all, and the push to revitalize the community may be more deadly than advertised.

When does coincidence become conspiracy? Where do people go when gentrification pushes them out? Can Sydney and Theo trust each other--or themselves--long enough to find out before they too disappear?"

Read Time: 9 days

Rating: 4.5 stars

Review

So I thought that this book started off very slowly as a thriller. There was a mystery, and strange things going on in the neighborhood as it starts to be gentrified. That being said, for a lot of the book, I wasn't feeling the tension.

That being said, I saw an interesting perspective about this that made me reconsider my own point-of-view. What I saw was that, for a black audience, the gentrification of the neighborhood is in itself scary - to see your community pushed out of their homes in favor of a people who have traditionally oppressed you is scary, especially if you've actually seen it happen. And that I can understand. While I've always lived in a predominantly white neighborhood, there are a certain type of people (predominantly white and faux-gressive) coming into my neighborhood and reshaping its culture, which I don't love. I also, while I was reading this book, watched a documentary about the Larzac, and the 10-year fight they went through to save their lands from being appropriated for an army base. Point is, outside forces coming to forcibly take your home from you is scary, and I should have been more cognizant of that while reading the first part of the book.

However, with all that said, I didn't need to be cognizant of anything to be scared in the second half. There were people who were having the cops called on them for no reason, people completely disappearing (and the people replacing them taking their dog, which is messed up), and of course, the ending was scary as hell. I genuinely had to put it down for a while, take some deep breaths, and come back to it when I was calmer. There was also a point where I decided I absolutely couldn't read it at night because I wasn't trying to give myself nightmares.

All in all, a very good book and one that is sticking with me.