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A review by 13iscute
The Elizas by Sara Shepard
4.0
2018 Pop Sugar Reading Challenge:
#16 A book about mental health
#34 A book that's published in 2018
“The Elizas” is a stand-alone mystery following the “unreliable narrator” trope, but in a different way than “Gone Girl” or “The Girl on the Train”. A little slow to get going, but gets going about halfway in, and then I did not want to put it down, even though I ended up staying up 1.5 hours past my bedtime, oops. There is a novel-within-a-novel, “The Dots”, with alternating chapters showing the main story vs. excerpts from the novel. This felt a little off at first, but the alternation ended up being at a good pace, so much so that near the end of the story, where there were a couple of Eliza chapters in a row, I was disappointed to have to wait to get another installment of Dot’s story! As the novel progresses, it ties together storylines and mysteries steadily and neatly, and keeps you hanging on until the very end. A fun and engrossing read.
The remainder of this review is my personal summary to help me remember what I’ve read. It has tons of plot details and reveals the ending, so don’t read unless you want to be totally spoiled!
Alternating chapters are excerpts of Eliza’s book, “The Dots”. The Dots is about a girl named Dot, who is a doppelganger of her Aunt Dorothy. Dorothy loves Dot and is by her side as a young Dot suffers through a hospitalization for seizures. Dot is sent to the ICU, Dorothy disappears, and Dot recovers. Dorothy is nowhere to be found for 12 years, but shows up again when Dot is in college. Dot starts going out regularly with her beloved aunt, but starts getting sick again with symptoms like those from her childhood. At first, Dot attributes it to drinking, but when her mom finds out she has been hanging out with Dorothy, she tells her daughter the truth. Dorothy has Munchausen by proxy disease, and poisoned Dot as a child, lacing her IV tubes with strychnine to incite her seizures. Dot, suspecting that Dorothy has been lacing her drinks, surreptitiously switches the drinks one evening. Dorothy gets really sick, and the two end up fighting on a bridge, where Dot pushes Dorothy over the guardrail onto the highway below.
In the real world, piece by piece, Eliza comes to find out that the novel she has written is actually an autobiography, written in a cathartic bout after what she believes was a surgery to remove a brain tumor. Eliza hadn’t remembered that the story and its details are really about her, but now her memories are starting to be triggered, and with admissions from her family, she begins to understand what happened to her. The events of the novel were real, with Dot representing Eliza and Dorothy representing Eliza’s Aunt Eleanor. Her family, trying to help her move past the abuse, put her through memory-deletion therapy, which is why she remembered nothing explicitly. But those memories were still there, and came out in the form of the novel. And the feelings were still there, which came out in paranoia. It was Eliza’s step-sister who pushed her in the pool, in a poorly-guided attempt to break her out of a state of paranoia.
The book hints that Eliza’s life is the same as Dot’s fairly early on, and the novel excerpts clearly outline what happened to Dot/Eliza, so the remainder of the novel is not too much about solving the mystery, but seeing how all the details come together. But it was engrossing, keeping me reading the final 2/3 of the novel in one sitting. It helps that there is one mysterious thread that remains open until the epilogue, making you wonder if they are ever going to resolve it, and keeping you reading until the very end. Throughout the novel, Eliza has been seeing her doppelganger around town and has been afraid. Finally, three years later, at Eliza’s second book launch, the doppelganger reveals herself. She is a nurse from one of the hospitals where Eliza had stayed as a child, and she looks so much like Aunt Eleanor that Eleanor paid her to spend a day at the spa in her name, so that Eleanor would have an alibi the day that she pushed Eliza’s doctor down the stairs. The nurse just wants to admit this to Eliza, and to also let her know that she saw Eleanor get pushed off the bridge, that Eliza doesn’t have to be guilty and doesn’t have to worry, because she knows for sure Eleanor is dead. The novel is left a little open-ended but also tied up cleanly. It’s possible that Eleanor had somehow switched places with the nurse at the last minute, and the nurse died and this is really Eleanor. But the nurse’s words leave Eliza assured that her aunt really is dead, so the reader can feel assured too.
#16 A book about mental health
#34 A book that's published in 2018
“The Elizas” is a stand-alone mystery following the “unreliable narrator” trope, but in a different way than “Gone Girl” or “The Girl on the Train”. A little slow to get going, but gets going about halfway in, and then I did not want to put it down, even though I ended up staying up 1.5 hours past my bedtime, oops. There is a novel-within-a-novel, “The Dots”, with alternating chapters showing the main story vs. excerpts from the novel. This felt a little off at first, but the alternation ended up being at a good pace, so much so that near the end of the story, where there were a couple of Eliza chapters in a row, I was disappointed to have to wait to get another installment of Dot’s story! As the novel progresses, it ties together storylines and mysteries steadily and neatly, and keeps you hanging on until the very end. A fun and engrossing read.
The remainder of this review is my personal summary to help me remember what I’ve read. It has tons of plot details and reveals the ending, so don’t read unless you want to be totally spoiled!
Spoiler
A novelist on the verge of publishing her first novel, Eliza Fontaine is fished out of a swimming pool. Her family thinks it’s another suicide attempt, but Eliza knows she was pushed, but why? Eliza’s memory has been foggy, and she was drinking that night, so that doesn’t help. As she digs deep to try to solve her own attempted cover, she realizes her life and her resurfacing memories are eerily similar to the details in her book. Too similar.Alternating chapters are excerpts of Eliza’s book, “The Dots”. The Dots is about a girl named Dot, who is a doppelganger of her Aunt Dorothy. Dorothy loves Dot and is by her side as a young Dot suffers through a hospitalization for seizures. Dot is sent to the ICU, Dorothy disappears, and Dot recovers. Dorothy is nowhere to be found for 12 years, but shows up again when Dot is in college. Dot starts going out regularly with her beloved aunt, but starts getting sick again with symptoms like those from her childhood. At first, Dot attributes it to drinking, but when her mom finds out she has been hanging out with Dorothy, she tells her daughter the truth. Dorothy has Munchausen by proxy disease, and poisoned Dot as a child, lacing her IV tubes with strychnine to incite her seizures. Dot, suspecting that Dorothy has been lacing her drinks, surreptitiously switches the drinks one evening. Dorothy gets really sick, and the two end up fighting on a bridge, where Dot pushes Dorothy over the guardrail onto the highway below.
In the real world, piece by piece, Eliza comes to find out that the novel she has written is actually an autobiography, written in a cathartic bout after what she believes was a surgery to remove a brain tumor. Eliza hadn’t remembered that the story and its details are really about her, but now her memories are starting to be triggered, and with admissions from her family, she begins to understand what happened to her. The events of the novel were real, with Dot representing Eliza and Dorothy representing Eliza’s Aunt Eleanor. Her family, trying to help her move past the abuse, put her through memory-deletion therapy, which is why she remembered nothing explicitly. But those memories were still there, and came out in the form of the novel. And the feelings were still there, which came out in paranoia. It was Eliza’s step-sister who pushed her in the pool, in a poorly-guided attempt to break her out of a state of paranoia.
The book hints that Eliza’s life is the same as Dot’s fairly early on, and the novel excerpts clearly outline what happened to Dot/Eliza, so the remainder of the novel is not too much about solving the mystery, but seeing how all the details come together. But it was engrossing, keeping me reading the final 2/3 of the novel in one sitting. It helps that there is one mysterious thread that remains open until the epilogue, making you wonder if they are ever going to resolve it, and keeping you reading until the very end. Throughout the novel, Eliza has been seeing her doppelganger around town and has been afraid. Finally, three years later, at Eliza’s second book launch, the doppelganger reveals herself. She is a nurse from one of the hospitals where Eliza had stayed as a child, and she looks so much like Aunt Eleanor that Eleanor paid her to spend a day at the spa in her name, so that Eleanor would have an alibi the day that she pushed Eliza’s doctor down the stairs. The nurse just wants to admit this to Eliza, and to also let her know that she saw Eleanor get pushed off the bridge, that Eliza doesn’t have to be guilty and doesn’t have to worry, because she knows for sure Eleanor is dead. The novel is left a little open-ended but also tied up cleanly. It’s possible that Eleanor had somehow switched places with the nurse at the last minute, and the nurse died and this is really Eleanor. But the nurse’s words leave Eliza assured that her aunt really is dead, so the reader can feel assured too.