I Found You by Lisa Jewell

Rating: ⭐️⭐️

(Don’t let the rating of the book turn you away from the review. You know my reviews make the books better anyway uu).

Before I begin, I just want to say that I don't normally read more than one book at a time. However, when I've committed to a series like Harry Potter or Game of Thrones (see: current read), I do allow myself short breaks in between arcs/chapters to read other short books. All this rant to explain why I've read I Found You by Lisa Jewell 'while' (by 'while' I mean during a break. I don't read both at the same time) reading GoT uu. 

Synopsis & Review (With Spoilers because you shouldn’t waste your time)

The story follows different narratives across two timelines, one set in 1993, and the other in present day 2015. The concept of the story was nice, but the execution was poor and boring, which is why the rating dropped from a 3.5 to 2 stars.

In 2015, Alice, a random woman of 41, mother of 3 children to 3 different absent fathers, living in Ridinghouse Bay, one day finds a man on a beach who has lost his memory. She takes him in because she is stupid and lets him stay in her shed for as long as he likes and eventually sleeps with him because she is a mother of three and depraved of the presence of a man. As a reader, you’re left wondering why the hell she didn’t just take him to the police, or better yet, to a hospital because what if there was something medically seriously wrong with his brain? You see a disoriented person who has lost their memory and you go and tell them ‘oh hey come live in my house where my youngest baby is a girl of 6’, to a grown man, a random stranger, because he looks handsome? What kind of mother are you? And forget mother, what kind of a selfish person is Alice to not even think that maybe, just maybe, this man has lost his memory because of blunt force trauma and needs medical help?

Oh nooooo, she just GOOGLED that he’s in a fugue state. Woman, please. 

You want to keep a strange man you know nothing about in your house where you have two daughters and a teenage son who probably couldn’t help you if everything went south, the least you could do is get a private doctor. Can’t do that? Then maybe you shouldn’t be harbouring a potential fugitive. 

The only time we get any sense of a reality check is when Jasmine, Alice’s eldest daughter (of 15 btw), points out what her mother has done by taking in a stranger and says he probably belongs somewhere to someone. But of course, dumb, stupid, idiotic, IQ of 3 Alice just sulks about it because to her it just means he isn’t hers anymore. 

?????????

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In 1993, the story is set in the whereabouts of the UK, where a quaint little family of four who went to vacation in Ridinghouse Bay had the misfortune of being stalked by one of the residents, Mark Tate, aged 19, who took an obsessive interest to Kirsty Ross, the youngest daughter, a teenager of 15. Her brother, Graham (Gray) Ross, 17ish, is the only one among the four of them who seems to think there’s something seriously wrong with Mark. 

Nobody listens to Gray’s intuitions, because they have parents who seem to look like Derp with air for brains, and just let their fifteen-year-old girl go off with this stranger of a adult man even when she gives them pleading looks that she clearly does not want to go at one point. I just feel like this book is made up of really, really sucky parents. Parents like Pam and Tony are the reason Gen Alpha is failing. Letting a fifteen-year-old go hang out unsupervised with a random stranger of 19 AT NIGHT OUTSIDE. Great parenting y’all. Tf. Like, whoooooooseee parents welcome their 15-yr old’s daughter’s adult boyfriend into the house with the keenness of welcoming the prime minister into their home???? “Bedrooms, want to see?” says the DAD? The FATHER??? The man of the house??? “Want to see”?? 😭😭 Is the DAD 15??? Where’s the masculinity? Where’s the “That is my daughter you’re parading around town smooching, you better watch it”. Where is the protectiveness? Are grown men, fathers, really such mellow wussies?

So yeah and then Kirsty goes off on dates with Mark and kisses him and tells him she loves him back. But after a while she starts to feel off herself and wants to break it off, but Mark is insistent and stalkerish and doesn’t leave them alone. And of course, the parents are SO stupid and clueless. And then one random night Gray develops a huge crush on one of Mark’s friends, Izzy, and agrees to go to a party at the place where Mark lives with his aunt (his parents disowned him on account of his psychopathic r*pey nature), inviting Kirsty along, and everything goes to poo-poo.

Mark gives them drugs and locks them up in a room. A gruesome fight ensues. Mark’s skull is pierced with a broken hanger, Gray’s wrist is broken and his head smashed to the floor, Kirsty is sexually assaulted. Mark drags Kirsty to the sea and Gray can’t follow because of his broken wrist. Their father comes looking for them but he gets a heart attack and dies. Gray loses all memory for 22 years.

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In 2015, Mark has changed his name to Carl Monrose and married a girl over 20 years younger than him, but his past is uncovered and he winds up in jail waiting for trial by the end of the book. The girl he married is 21 and from the Ukraine. Her name is Lily and she is described as the spitting image of Keira Knightly (which is another writing blip of Lisa Jewel that I detested. She based all the physical descriptions of her characters on actors. Oh, Lily looks like Keira Knightly. Gray/Carl looks like Ben Affleck, Alice like Catherine Deneuve. Come up with your own descriptions, woman). Anyway, Lily is portrayed as strong of character supposedly, but she was just shallow and snappy to me. Her reason not to return to the Ukraine to her family and comfort is because ‘Carl was her ticket to the UK.’  It feels like such a crap reason. Like Lisa Jewell tried and failed to come up with a rationale for why Lily should stay in the UK. Also it really paints immigrants as leeches preying on the British. 

Part Four of the book is an entire summary of the book. As in, if you read nothing and skip ahead to Part Four, you’ll know the entire story without the pain and drag of the narrative, which I found to be quite annoying. It’s supposed to have been a newspaper article about the case of Mark Tate and the other characters, but it read like a mid journalist’s review. You can tell Lisa Jewell wasn’t meant to be a journalist.

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Overall, this book annoyed me to bits. I was excited to read it in the beginning, but it lost its charm very quickly. I’m glad I’m done with it and it’s off my shoulders because I don’t really enjoy DNFing.

*sigh*

Toodles my darlings