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A review by blurrypetals
For You and Only You by Caroline Kepnes
4.0
A Goodreads girl, Joe? Really?
Despite my frustration and boredom with the previous book, You Love Me, I couldn't bring myself to skip this one. I enjoyed the fourth season of the television adaptation well enough, too, so I was intrigued to see how it might compare.
And man, where You Love Me was a big letdown that felt like a more boring retread of You and ditched plotlines and characters set up in previous books, For You and Only You was a hilarious joyride of insanity that by contrast uses its episodic nature only to its benefit.
I think one of the reasons this was so much more fun to me will be obvious for those who know me at all: the writing angle. I've always been very amused by Joe's musings on literature as well as media in general, but having him go in on writing, writers, and, perhaps most important and entertaining of all, the pretentiousness surrounding writing, writing groups, and the publishing industry.
I also found Joe's latest obsession, Wonder, to be the most interesting since Love in Hidden Bodies, and even then, Love was really only interesting right at the very end, where Wonder stayed the same disastrous person the whole time, which was absolutely the point. I enjoyed how much friction she and Joe had in their relationship, how there were very few moments of reprieve for the two of them, a huge contrast to Joe's past victims in that sometimes it felt like Wonder was intentionally punishing him for his crimes when she was just that frustrating to him even with his rose-colored glasses on and the way their story ends is refreshingly different and interesting by contrast compared to the other books and victims.
The supporting cast was also interesting in a big way; Sarah Beth is almost as wonderfully terrible as Peach was in the first book, and all her scenes with Joe were very fun.
All in all, I felt like this was a massive improvement over You Love Me and, to be honest, I might even have liked it more than Hidden Bodies. I still think I'd prefer Kepnes to write something new and different instead of revisiting Joe Goldberg over and over again, but if she keeps writing them like this one, I definitely can't be too mad about it either.
Despite my frustration and boredom with the previous book, You Love Me, I couldn't bring myself to skip this one. I enjoyed the fourth season of the television adaptation well enough, too, so I was intrigued to see how it might compare.
And man, where You Love Me was a big letdown that felt like a more boring retread of You and ditched plotlines and characters set up in previous books, For You and Only You was a hilarious joyride of insanity that by contrast uses its episodic nature only to its benefit.
I think one of the reasons this was so much more fun to me will be obvious for those who know me at all: the writing angle. I've always been very amused by Joe's musings on literature as well as media in general, but having him go in on writing, writers, and, perhaps most important and entertaining of all, the pretentiousness surrounding writing, writing groups, and the publishing industry.
I also found Joe's latest obsession, Wonder, to be the most interesting since Love in Hidden Bodies, and even then, Love was really only interesting right at the very end, where Wonder stayed the same disastrous person the whole time, which was absolutely the point. I enjoyed how much friction she and Joe had in their relationship, how there were very few moments of reprieve for the two of them, a huge contrast to Joe's past victims in that sometimes it felt like Wonder was intentionally punishing him for his crimes when she was just that frustrating to him even with his rose-colored glasses on and the way their story ends is refreshingly different and interesting by contrast compared to the other books and victims.
The supporting cast was also interesting in a big way; Sarah Beth is almost as wonderfully terrible as Peach was in the first book, and all her scenes with Joe were very fun.
All in all, I felt like this was a massive improvement over You Love Me and, to be honest, I might even have liked it more than Hidden Bodies. I still think I'd prefer Kepnes to write something new and different instead of revisiting Joe Goldberg over and over again, but if she keeps writing them like this one, I definitely can't be too mad about it either.