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jennboch's review against another edition
3.0
I liked the book. But it focused on math formulas alot which I found I was skipping over.
beastreader's review against another edition
4.0
Twenty years ago Lila, Ellie Enderlin's sister disappeared, only to turn up a few days later died. Who would want to hurt Lila? Lila was a top math student at Stanford. Ellie obtains in her possession a notebook belonging to her sister that is filled with tons of mathematcial equations. Ellie is now on the hunt to solve the puzzle and Lila's murderer.
Along the way Ellie meets a man by the name of Andrew Thorpe. He is curious about Lila's unsolved murder and asks Ellie questions. The next thing Ellie knows, Andrew is writing a book about Lila titled "Murder by the Bay".
This is my first book by Michelle Richmond. I thought it was a good one. The only thing I had with it was at first it confused me a little when Ellie would flash back to the past and than the present, otherwise I liked how the story line came together. I thought I had the killer figured out but I was wrong. You won't belive who the murderer is and what his relationship is to Lila.
Along the way Ellie meets a man by the name of Andrew Thorpe. He is curious about Lila's unsolved murder and asks Ellie questions. The next thing Ellie knows, Andrew is writing a book about Lila titled "Murder by the Bay".
This is my first book by Michelle Richmond. I thought it was a good one. The only thing I had with it was at first it confused me a little when Ellie would flash back to the past and than the present, otherwise I liked how the story line came together. I thought I had the killer figured out but I was wrong. You won't belive who the murderer is and what his relationship is to Lila.
deborahbabin's review against another edition
2.0
Not my favorite book. She talks a lot about how a book should be written & how people write a lot of useless detail... she wrote a lot of useless detail. I felt it could be about 100 pages less.
ridgewaygirl's review against another edition
4.0
This was the ideal vacation read. It was diverting, without requiring my undivided attention. In it, a woman looks for her sister's murderer, after the man who she thought was the culprit convinces her of his innocence. It's pretty much a standard thriller/mystery novel, but it's well-executed, well-written and well-plotted, which is enough to make it a stand-out in a very crowded field. Refreshingly, the conclusion didn't involve the protagonist putting herself into jeopardy, the killer being unnaturally evil or the person a lesser novelist would have chosen. No One You Know was fun, and while I suspect I'll have forgotten it in a few months, it was good enough for me to want to find a copy of the author's other book.
annhenry's review against another edition
3.0
I enjoyed this book. It ended up being a mystery/thriller but in a low key way. Sometimes the math got a little heavy handed and the ending wasn't what I expected I found the book easy/enjoyable to read.
andreagraves5's review against another edition
4.0
I enjoyed this mystery. There were interesting characters and a cool plot.
19paws's review against another edition
4.0
Very moving and beautifully written. In this book, Michelle Richmond examines the complexity and evolution of stories and story telling in the same way that she looked at the complexity of memory in The Year of Fog. I think I liked this even better than TYoF. (And, of course, I loved that the author poked fun at herself by having her protagonist give a somewhat lukewarm review of that earlier novel.) It’s a great story—a good literary mystery—and the little snippets about coffee and mathematics added to my enjoyment of this book.
misajane79's review against another edition
4.0
Beautiful novel about sisters, death, and coffee. And a few other things as well. I couldn't remember why I had put this on my to-read list, and I wasn't exactly eager to start it, but I flew through this book. It's a rich, layered story that doesn't have any false notes. It would have been so easy to end things in a neat little bow, and she didn't. Highly recommended.
mrsfligs's review against another edition
4.0
Ellie Enderlin is a professional coffee buyer whose life is influenced by one event: the murder of her sister Lila twenty years earlier. After a chance encounter during a coffee buying trip, Ellie decides to conduct her own investigation into Lila's death, which was never officially solved. However, doing so forces her to confront the truth of her family, her relationship with her sister, and her own isolation. Complicating matters is Ellie's own guilt for unwittingly contributing to a true crime book written about her sister's murder, which has unduly influenced Ellie's own thinking about the event. Although this description might make the book sound like a straightforward "by the books" thriller, it really is more than that. Although Ellie does conduct her own investigation (as only people in novels seem to do), the book deals with the complicated emotions surrounding the murder of a loved one as much as it does with the "whodunit" aspect. I thought this elevated the book above your standard mystery/thriller, and Richmond does a great job of working in little details about coffee, math, music and writing that add interest to the story. Most of all, Richmond does a wonderful job making Ellie a fully rounded character, which is so often lacking in books of this ilk. The book is a solid and satisfying read, and I would recommend it without reservation. An added little bonus in my edition was the author's No One You Know playlist, which includes songs either referenced in the book or that capture its spirit and setting. I think Michelle Richmond has pretty good taste in music!
Excerpt: Lila was like an unfinished novel—two hundred pages in, just when you're really getting into the story, you realize the rest never got written. You'll never know how the story ended. Instead, you're left with an abrupt and unsatisfying non-end, all the threads of the plot hanging loose.
Rating: 4 stars
Excerpt: Lila was like an unfinished novel—two hundred pages in, just when you're really getting into the story, you realize the rest never got written. You'll never know how the story ended. Instead, you're left with an abrupt and unsatisfying non-end, all the threads of the plot hanging loose.
Rating: 4 stars
karieh13's review against another edition
3.0
This book is about a story. By which I mean the story that we create of our lives, and the stories that are created by others about who they think we are. Ellie Enderlin, the main character of "No One You Know", has lived most of her adult life as part of her dead sister's Lila's story...the one created when her sister was murdered decades ago.
Ellie lives in such blind acceptance of the details set forth in the book that was written about her older sister's murder that the first half of this book was very frustrating to me. Because most of the book takes place twenty years after Lila's murder, the main characters don't have the same sense of urgency that the reader does - to find out the truth, find out what really happened. The reader joins the story after it appears that all have given up, and it makes for a long time before the events of the book really take hold.
Ellie is a reader, her sister was a mathematician. Where Lila depended on facts and figures, Ellie relies on words. And when her former professor writes a book about Lila, about their family, about the murder, those words become Ellie's facts.
"I was barely twenty years old when I read your book," I said. "And I believed every word of it. You wrote the story of my life before I'd had a chance to live it. You said I was directionless, but how could you have known that? I was still so young. But I thought you were so smart, I thought you knew the answers. No one had ever examined me as closely as you did, no one had ever taken as keen an interest. I figured you'd seen into my core and could make out, better than anyone else, who I was. It wasn't very smart on my part. I know I'm as much to blame as you - or more - but I became that character."
And as for Lila, "Lila was like an unfinished novel - two hundred pages in, just when you're really getting into the story, you realize the rest never got written. You'll never know who the story ended. Instead, you're left with an abrupt and unsatisfying non-end, all the threads of the plot hanging loose."
It's funny, because it was about two hundred pages in that I really got into this book, about where Ellie starts actively pursuing the truth. She starts asking the questions she should have asked long ago, starts learning more about her sister than the story Lila wrote for herself. Still, there were several threads that were still hanging loose at the end, a few characters (like Ellie's parents) that barely existed in the story, and one real life character that sticks out like a sore thumb. It was jarring having journalist Ben Fong-Torres inhabit this fictional world. I still don't quite see the connection...
Richmond does use very evocative language to draw the reader in, most often about location. "The place had a bland institutional smell - floor cleaner and cardboard, a slight chemical odor that might have been dry erase markers. The smell of the world was changing, I noticed it every day. When I was in college, the buildings of USF smelled like chalk, old books, and mimeograph ink."
And, "The place smelled of floor polish, potpourri, and the musty, burnt odor that lingers after a rug has been cleaned with an old vacuum cleaner." (Ellie makes a living partly through her sense of smell, she is a coffee buyer.)
But the author gives us more description that of just place and smell. We're given a small taste of what it might be like to be the person left behind, the survivor when a family member is ripped away. "He had done such enormous damage to my family, had taken on such absurd proportions in my mind, that no one could make me feel the depth of emotion he elicited. It was hatred I felt for him, and when hatred goes deep enough, no affection can compare. For love to take hold there must be available space in the mind and heart; I was so eaten up with anger toward him, I could not make room."
I am not sure to whom "No One You Know" refers...to Lila, or Ellie, or most of the people Ellie has known throughout her life. Only in this story has she started to read between the lines...started to look deeper than she has in all her thirty-eight years. She finally learns:
"Every story is flawed, every story is subject to change. Even after it is set down in print, between the covers of a book, a story is not immune to alteration. People can go on telling it in their own way, remembering it the way they want. And in each telling, the ending may change, or even the beginning. Inevitably, in some cases it will be worse, and in others it just might be better. A story, after all, does not only belong to the one who is telling it. It belongs, in equal measure, to the one who is listening."
Ellie lives in such blind acceptance of the details set forth in the book that was written about her older sister's murder that the first half of this book was very frustrating to me. Because most of the book takes place twenty years after Lila's murder, the main characters don't have the same sense of urgency that the reader does - to find out the truth, find out what really happened. The reader joins the story after it appears that all have given up, and it makes for a long time before the events of the book really take hold.
Ellie is a reader, her sister was a mathematician. Where Lila depended on facts and figures, Ellie relies on words. And when her former professor writes a book about Lila, about their family, about the murder, those words become Ellie's facts.
"I was barely twenty years old when I read your book," I said. "And I believed every word of it. You wrote the story of my life before I'd had a chance to live it. You said I was directionless, but how could you have known that? I was still so young. But I thought you were so smart, I thought you knew the answers. No one had ever examined me as closely as you did, no one had ever taken as keen an interest. I figured you'd seen into my core and could make out, better than anyone else, who I was. It wasn't very smart on my part. I know I'm as much to blame as you - or more - but I became that character."
And as for Lila, "Lila was like an unfinished novel - two hundred pages in, just when you're really getting into the story, you realize the rest never got written. You'll never know who the story ended. Instead, you're left with an abrupt and unsatisfying non-end, all the threads of the plot hanging loose."
It's funny, because it was about two hundred pages in that I really got into this book, about where Ellie starts actively pursuing the truth. She starts asking the questions she should have asked long ago, starts learning more about her sister than the story Lila wrote for herself. Still, there were several threads that were still hanging loose at the end, a few characters (like Ellie's parents) that barely existed in the story, and one real life character that sticks out like a sore thumb. It was jarring having journalist Ben Fong-Torres inhabit this fictional world. I still don't quite see the connection...
Richmond does use very evocative language to draw the reader in, most often about location. "The place had a bland institutional smell - floor cleaner and cardboard, a slight chemical odor that might have been dry erase markers. The smell of the world was changing, I noticed it every day. When I was in college, the buildings of USF smelled like chalk, old books, and mimeograph ink."
And, "The place smelled of floor polish, potpourri, and the musty, burnt odor that lingers after a rug has been cleaned with an old vacuum cleaner." (Ellie makes a living partly through her sense of smell, she is a coffee buyer.)
But the author gives us more description that of just place and smell. We're given a small taste of what it might be like to be the person left behind, the survivor when a family member is ripped away. "He had done such enormous damage to my family, had taken on such absurd proportions in my mind, that no one could make me feel the depth of emotion he elicited. It was hatred I felt for him, and when hatred goes deep enough, no affection can compare. For love to take hold there must be available space in the mind and heart; I was so eaten up with anger toward him, I could not make room."
I am not sure to whom "No One You Know" refers...to Lila, or Ellie, or most of the people Ellie has known throughout her life. Only in this story has she started to read between the lines...started to look deeper than she has in all her thirty-eight years. She finally learns:
"Every story is flawed, every story is subject to change. Even after it is set down in print, between the covers of a book, a story is not immune to alteration. People can go on telling it in their own way, remembering it the way they want. And in each telling, the ending may change, or even the beginning. Inevitably, in some cases it will be worse, and in others it just might be better. A story, after all, does not only belong to the one who is telling it. It belongs, in equal measure, to the one who is listening."