A review by probablyjenna
You Know What You Did by K.T. Nguyen

2.0

This book was just not it for me. There are a lot of reasons why, but I think I’ll set this review up as a what I liked/what I didn’t like format.

LIKED:

• I think Nguyen did a remarkable job forcing readers into the headspace of someone living with contamination/disgust based OCD. It was so uncomfortable being inside Annie’s head; I felt frustrated because I knew I couldn’t rely on her depiction of events, but was so embedded into her thought process that it was hard to see things clearly.
• The overall concept was cool. I liked the idea of a Vietnam war survivor struggling to make a new life in a new country after losing basically everything, and the exploration of how that could manifest mental illness.

MISSES:

• Wow, the teenage daughter was repulsive. As someone who has worked with teens for 10 years, I just could not handle what a rude, thoughtless jerk the 15-year-old daughter was…and how her parents basically just excused it nonstop or blamed it on the mother’s mental instability. Absolutely not. Me and that kid would have been having lots of touchy-feely heart-to-hearts to unpack why she was so hateful.
• Dialogue, in general, was really cringey. The way people spoke was just not natural a lot of the time, to the point where it was distracting (and sometimes funny.)
• The pacing is all over the place. It was hard to follow some events. Parts of the book were really repetitive. The last third of the book felt really disconnected from the rest of it. 
• The twist at the ending was not a good payoff for me. It felt really outlandish and almost cartoonishly evil. That’s just not my taste when it comes to a thriller.

All that said, I dislike a lot of thrillers (despite loving the genre!!!) and could see this working well for fans of Lisa Jewell, Ruth Ware, and Alice Feeney.

I am super grateful to the publisher for allowing me early access to this novel & all of the opinions in this review are my own.