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A review by library_dreamer
If You Tell by Gregg Olsen
dark
tense
medium-paced
4.0
If you are sensitive to any of the content warnings attached to this one, just know that they are not idly tagged. They are frequent and graphic.
It took me a long time to figure out how I was going to rate this one. If this had been fiction, I would have DNF pretty early on because it would have been too unnecessarily grotesque and would have made me question the sanity of the author. Stephen King at his worst doesn't have a character nearly as twisted as Shelley Knotek.
The fact that it was true crime held me to it because it became something I needed to see to completion, but it took me so long to read this because I needed frequent breaks. I knew going in that there would be a lot of abuse and murder (the title gives that away) and I had googled Knotek before starting, so I knew I wasn't getting myself into a feel-good family drama. But I was not prepared for the extreme level of details of physical and emotional abuse. If I were to find out that 75% was fabricated, the other 25% would still be enough to make me sick.
It took me a long time to figure out how I was going to rate this one. If this had been fiction, I would have DNF pretty early on because it would have been too unnecessarily grotesque and would have made me question the sanity of the author. Stephen King at his worst doesn't have a character nearly as twisted as Shelley Knotek.
The fact that it was true crime held me to it because it became something I needed to see to completion, but it took me so long to read this because I needed frequent breaks. I knew going in that there would be a lot of abuse and murder (the title gives that away) and I had googled Knotek before starting, so I knew I wasn't getting myself into a feel-good family drama. But I was not prepared for the extreme level of details of physical and emotional abuse. If I were to find out that 75% was fabricated, the other 25% would still be enough to make me sick.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Child abuse, Emotional abuse, Physical abuse, Murder, Violence, Vomit, Domestic abuse, and Drug abuse