A review by thatotherjlo
When No One Is Watching by Alyssa Cole

mysterious slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? Yes
• Loveable characters? Yes
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.0

Cole displays great skill with character and world building in When No One is Watching, seen especially in her depiction of the neighborhood at the novel’s core. It’s a little hard to pin down the genre of this novel, but in any case it is clearly a love letter to tight-knit communities – which are, as Cole illustrates, threatened by “revitalization” projects such as the one Sydney finds herself living through.

As a historian, I enjoyed the red thread through the book of history, from the tour that starts it all to Sydney’s research for her own. I found Cole’s use of the tour at the very beginning, which Sydney found so empty and lacking in any content that truly mattered or reflected the lived history of the neighborhood, a lovely device to introduce the issues at the heart of this story, and I absolutely loved Sydney’s “full circle” moment in chapter 17, when she sees the connection between the research she has done and what is happening to her neighborhood.

That said, some of the story-telling elements did not work effectively or even took me out of the story. I rarely read thrillers, but I was struck by the pacing of this one and how long it took to get to the action/stakes. That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy the first half, which is where all that rich world-building happens (and which makes the reader truly feel the horror of something that might otherwise seem insignificant, such as the bodega closing), simply that it did not line up with my expectations for the book/genre. I also found the POV shifts between Sydney and Theo ineffective, because they revealed each character’s actions and thoughts to us at the same time as they were wondering about each other; as they each doubted the other, we already knew their motivations and roles/where they stood, even if some secrets were not revealed from the outset.

Lastly, I have to say, I was not a fan of the ending, which felt dissonant; the pacing was entirely off from the rest of the novel, the genre seemed to dive into sci-fi and horror, and the “bad guys” were unidimensional caricatures. For a “thriller” that took so long to get to the action, the ending was extremely unsatisfying.

I picked this novel up because I wanted to spread my genre horizons and read a thriller, and in the end what I liked best was the attention to characters and communities… Keep that in mind if you decide to give this one a try.