It's been almost a year since Billie Flanagan disappeared, leaving her husband and teenaged daughter to pick up the pieces. She spent a weekend hiking alone in Desolation Wilderness, and all that was found was a cell phone, broken at the bottom of a ravine, and one shoe. Now, on the anniversary of her death, her husband Jonathan is getting ready to go to court to have her legally declared dead. He's been coping by drinking too much and avoiding creditors while working on a memoir of their loving marriage. 

Meanwhile, his daughter Olive is struck one day at school by a vision of her mother that is so realistic that Olive inadvertently walks into a wall trying to get to her. She sees her mother on a beach, alive, reaching out to her. While her father is distant and lost in his own thoughts much of the time, Olive decides to follow her vision and try to find her mother. 

As Jonathan gets together the paperwork he needs for the court procedure, he starts to find things. $30,000 missing from their savings account. A phone number for a private investigator. A reference to a motel stay. Jonathan starts to investigate, to discover who his wife really was and what she was hiding from him. 

Their search for Billie turns up lots of questions, but what is the truth? Did she go see the parents she had refused to visit since she left as a teenager? Did she have a lover? Did she really die in that wilderness? As Jonathan faces the truth that his marriage wasn't quite the ideal that his memoir was making it out to be, Olive is dealing with her own struggle to find out who she is without her mother's presence in her life. Both father and daughter find pieces of themselves that were both stronger and weaker due to Billie's out-sized personality, and they both have to find closure to their questions before they can move on with their lives. 

Janelle Brown's Watch Me Disappear is a moving story of a family that is torn apart by a mystery and put back together, stronger, as the truths about their relationships emerged. It's a deep dive into the secrets we keep from those that we love, the parts of ourselves that we give up, and the price of those secrets and lies. Beautifully written and piercingly honest, Watch Me Disappear is one of the great thrillers of this summer. You don't want to miss this brutal and brilliant look at a family and the individuals that come together to make it whole. 



Galleys for Watch Me Disappear were provided by Random House through NetGalley.com, with many thanks.

This book was well written with a good storyline that kept you making your own guesses throughout. However, it was just never a book that grabbed me or that I wanted to make time to get back to. It never really fully engaged me and I really disliked the ending. So it's definitely worth a read and IS entertaining, but it just wasn't one of my favorites.

Thanks so much to NetGalley, the publishers Spiegel & Grau, and Janelle Brown for granting my wish to read and review this book! 4.5 stars - I really liked this one!

Set in Berkley, CA, Billie, Jonathan and Olive are a somewhat-typical family. Billie and Jonathan are seemingly happily married, although Jonathan has become a workaholic and Billie is getting tired of that. Teenaged Olive is attending a private girls high school, smart but never quite fitting in. Then Billie goes off on a solo hike and doesn't return. Only her boot is found.

What happens when someone just disappears? Are they dead or missing? After a year, Jonathan petitions to have his wife declared dead so they can begin to move on and he can collect her badly-needed life insurance. Jonathan's words at Billie's memorial service go viral and he is offered a book deal to write about their life and her death. Interspersed in this book are short snippets of the book that give us a glimpse of background.

Olive begins having "visions" of her mom and starts questioning whether or not her mom is really dead, which puts her at odds with her dad.

At the heart of this book, it's a great character study. How well do we know ourselves and others? Can we come to grips with the path we've chosen in life? What secrets do we keep or share?

I couldn't put this one down - highly recommended!

Could not make it past chapter one. No attention grabber and no interest in characters shown.

The next morning, the head ranger came in and offered Olive a box of doughnuts as if sugar might cushion the blow, and Jonathan got to watch his daughter’s face collapse inward as this weather-battered man uttered the words We’re calling off the search. The understanding hit him like a fist in the gut a half second later, choking him wordless.

Watch Me Disappear by Janelle Brown tells the story of Olive and Jonathan; forced into the role of single parent after the unsolved disappearance of his wife, Billie, Jonathan struggles to communicate with Olive who has transformed into a sullen teenager withholding many of the things they used to share. Shaken by the possibility of her mother’s death, Olive experiences a supernatural event, or so she believes, which causes her to wonder if her mother may be alive, lost or hurt, and trying to call for help.

The visions are frustratingly cryptic and uncontrollable; they shimmer across her existence like layers of cellophane rather than offering any useful information. They feel like fragments of clues, signs pointing toward a bigger picture she can’t quite grasp. What does it all mean?

Almost one year after she first disappeared, Billie appears to Olive, ethereal and angelic, floating among the girls at Olive’s all-girl private school. She beckons to Olive, asking why she has stopped looking for her.

Claremont Prep courtyard now with her eyes closed, the rain soaking through her shoes as she thinks of phantoms, and visions, and possibility. Her mind keeps settling back in the same place: What if Mom is still alive, somewhere, and she has reached out to let me know?

Gleaning clues from that first vision, Olive recruits the help of a friend and the two set out to canvass the beach houses of Santa Cruz, the last place Olive and her parents visited together, hoping to find Billie, some one who recognizes her, any clue to distract from the morbid possibility that threatens to stick with each passing day.

Meanwhile, Jonathan trudges through his grief at the loss of his wife. As the first anniversary of her disappearance approaches, he begins to reevaluate his life and the expectations Billie had of him and their marriage. As he reminisces, he questions his role in her disappearance.

“Everybody needs someone to take care of them,” I replied. “Whether they know it or not.” She looked at me for a long time. “You’re right.” She leaned in and kissed me hard. “OK. Let’s do it. I love you. Let’s get married.” And so we did, two near-strangers jumping off a cliff together. For sixteen years, I tried my hardest to live up to that promise: to watch out for her, be her safe harbor. We made a beautiful life together, raised a beloved child, and built a nice home, at which point I must have forgotten my vigilance. Because in the end, I didn’t manage to keep her safe at all.

Jonathan knows very little about Billie’s life before they met. Cryptically referred to as her “Lost Years”, Billie only shares bits a pieces- her oppressive parents, transient lifestyle and rebellious choices- never painting a detailed picture. Ever the free spirit, Billie was known for her grab-life-by-the-balls attitude and her need for adventure and excitement. Jonathan did what he could to facilitate, but after she vanished on a solo hiking trip on the Pacific Crest Trail, the guilt begins to take its toll. Quitting his job at a tech magazine to write a memoir about Billie and their life together, Jonathan begins to uncover parts of her past that lead him to question the very foundation of their marriage.

Surely a few lies don’t change everything, he keeps trying to reassure himself; she’s still the same person you loved. You always knew she was a complicated woman, even if you’ve been glossing over that in your memoir. But something has shifted internally, and he’s not sure how to set it back to where he began. The discontents he had in his marriage— the ones he’s been ignoring out of, what, respect for the dead? convenience for his book?— are starting to creep through in his writing. How is he supposed to write a love story when he’s clearly been deceived by his own protagonist?

Unable to accept the fact that his wife really is dead, Jonathan chooses to follow Olive’s lead and begins to search even deeper, looking for an explanation for her disappearance- whether that be a lover or possibly a suspect. What he reveals sends him further down the path of self-doubt, and it proves to be even worse than the possibility of her death.

The thing was— I secretly liked this about her. I liked the way it made me feel so chosen. Other people might come and go, but I was the one she really loved. She held the bar so very, very high, and Olive and I were the only ones who made the cut. It made me feel closer to her. But now that she’s gone, I have to wonder: Was that bar so impossibly high that no one, even Olive and me, could hang on to it for long? Did our particular brand of bullshit finally cross the threshold of her limits? Should I have realized, that day in Big Sur when I smiled blindly out at a crowd compromised almost entirely of my friends, that I was marrying a woman who didn’t want to be known by anyone— not even me? If I dig back far enough in Billie’s history, will I finally find someone who knows what was really going on inside her?

Each clue points to a different possibility, but what Olive and Jonathan discover is more than they could have ever anticipated. A true psychological suspense, Watch Me Disappear explores how the secrets we keep never truly stay hidden.

“…All people are unknowable, no matter how close you may think you are. Of the millions of thoughts we all think every day, of the millions of experiences we have, how many do we allow other people to know about? A handful? And no one willingly shares their worst, do they? The flaws you see, those are like the very tip of an iceberg. So we’re all just poking around on the surface, trying to figure out the people we love with a kind of, I guess, naïve idealism.”

I am going to review the book "Watch Me Disappear," by Janelle Brown. This book is hot off the press as it was published today July 11, 2017 by Random House Publishing Group. For those of you who would like to purchase a copy of this book CLICK HERE. Janelle Brown is a bestselling author. She previously wrote the books "All We Ever Wanted Was Everything," and "This is Where We Live." "Watch Me Disappear" is about Billie a married mother of one child dies while she is hiking. This is about the grief of a loss of a mother and how her daughter, Olive and husband Jonathon cope with her loss. Olive starts seeing her mother and receiving messages from her mother through hallucinations. From there while her husband is writing a book about his loss he finds out information that his wife had a different life before him and was keeping secrets. From here both Olive and Jonathon begin to question Billie's death of whether she died or left them behind.
Overall I rated this book four stars out of five. I really did enjoy reading this book, it had a lot of substance to it. It was a book that had it not been for the publisher who sent me a copy of this book I would probably have never read, but I am definitely glad I did read it. The characters were likable and had depth. The story kept me on my feet wanting to find out what happened to Billie. And I absolutely loved the ending. There were a few times in the book where I did want more to happen, but overall I would highly recommend this book to read. Go ahead and find out for yourself does Billie die while hiking or does she leave her family for a different life altogether?
I want to thank Netgalley, Janelle Brown, and Random House Publishing Group for giving me the opportunity to read this book in exchange for an honest review.

Watch me disappear what a great book. Looking forward to read more books from this author.

In Watch Me Disappear, Billie Flanagan, a Berkeley mother with an interesting past, went out on a solo hike (as all good angsty people ought since Wild) and never returned. All that was found of her was a hiking boot and her cell phone, and she is presumed dead. A year later, her husband and daughter are trying their hardest to get on with life, but that is still proving difficult. Jonathan, her husband, has quit his corporate job in order to write a memoir of his life with Billie and her teenaged daughter Olive is getting more teenager-ish by the day.


While they wait for enough time to pass to be issued an official death certificate, Olive starts to have strange visions of her mother trying to contact her to convey that she is not actually dead. She soon starts to believe that there is more to the story and she starts to look for Billie, uncovering a whole slew of secrets about her life. Jonathan somehow gets pulled into this and they fall into a confusing (to them and to us) mess of leads and discoveries about who Billie really was.


It’s hard to categorize this book – mystery, thriller, novel, YA possibly – and I stopped trying eventually and just read it. While I overall enjoyed the story, and was really drawn in by the plot, this book is a bit too long and ultimately not very satisfying. The ending was good, and unexpected, but I wish that it had come sooner. There is no denying, however, that Janelle Brown can write. I would definitely read another of her books, but can’t wholeheartedly recommend this one.


Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for an advanced copy of Watch Me Disappear; it will be available July 11 everywhere.

"Maybe this is why they say love is blind: Who you want people to be makes you blind to who they really are."

Jonathan Flanagan met wild child Billie "Sybilla" Thrace and immediately fell head over heels in love with her. They were engaged six weeks later and married for sixteen years.

But lately Jonathan has been working long hours as the senior editor at a tech magazine he's worked at for years. And Olive, their teen daughter, is going through growing pains and wants nothing to do with either her mother or her father. So Billie decides she's going on a solo hike along the Pacific Crest Trail in the Desolation wilderness area. And she never comes home and her body is never found.

It's a year later and Jonathan and Olive are trying to put their lives back together.

The premise of this story was promising. I really looked forward to reading it. But it was dry and downright boring in spots. And it was filled with narcissistic characters that were impossible to like.

The story is told partly by Jonathan, partly by Olive, and partly through chapters of a memoir Jonathan is writing about Billie.

All the pieces were there to make this a decent story but they just didn't mesh.

I received this book from Spiegel and Grau through Net Galley in exchange for my unbiased review.

I read this book, although it was hard for me to finish. It is well written and the characters are also well defined. But for some reason, I just did not connect with the storyline. The book is more about the characters and less about action. I did try to like it.

I started this book a few weeks ago but it just seemed dull and slow going. Once I hit the halfway mark though I couldn't seem to put it down. This book was definitely a puzzle that kept changing on me. I loved the ending although I wish Jonathan and Olive knew the truth. Overall a good read.

A mother/wife disappears, but is she just missing or dead? I liked the way this book switched narrative from father to daughter so you get to see what each is thinking. It kept me guessing about what truly happened a year earlier; I kept thinking I had it figured, and then something new would be revealed. After all was said and done, I must say I really disliked the mother/wife, but it's still a book I would recommend.

I received this book from NetGalley and Random House Publishing Group in exchange for my honest review.

I really enjoyed this book. I finished in the same day I started it and did not want to put it down. It had the right amount of suspense that left me wondering the entire time. I kept changing my theory about what really happened all the way to the end. I can't say too much without giving away too much.

I highly recommend you read it and it is going to be in my top five of the year!

I didn't give this book a star rating because I wasn't able to finish it only because it was written in a style I didn't find enjoyable.

Janelle Brown’s Watch Me Disappear is the sort of summer read that’s dishy enough to enjoy at the pool or beach, but is well-written enough that you won’t feel like you wasted your precious vacation time on yet another Gone Girl rehash. This is a thoughtful examination of family and identity, as well as a genuine page-turner.

Berkeley mom Billie Flanagan disappears while she’s on a solo hike, leaving her devastated husband Jonathan and teenage daughter Olive behind to deal with her loss. Despite extensive searching, Billie’s body was never found (some random detritus, like a boot and a phone, were recovered). Not having 100% solid proof that Billie is actually dead makes the situation even more fraught. Jonathan quit his highly demanding job in order to write a book and to be available to his daughter, but financial pressures—Billie’s life insurance policy requires a death certificate, which is difficult to procure without a body—are driving him to drink. Then Olive starts having visions in which her mother is still very much alive.

Both Jonathan and Olive make discoveries about Billie and her mysterious and complicated past, which she had never been particularly open about. Jonathan also has to decide how to handle Olive’s insistence that her mother is not dead and is, indeed, trying to communicate with her. He also falls into a relationship with Billie’s best friend, one of the few people who knew her before she became a wife and mom.

All of the revelations seem true to the characters instead of simply piled on for maximum shock effect, making Watch Me Disappear one of the most compelling thrillers I’ve read in a while.

She was a trickster, a chameleon, a con artist of the heart. Did anyone ever really know Billie? Now presumed dead, Billie has left behind a grieving husband and child, each caught up in their own personal Hell, neither able to quite break through the walls to support each other in their greatest time of need.

Olive lived with the survivor’s guilt of being a normal teen, left midway in her quest to be an independent person by a mother whom she never felt she quite lived up to and now she is having “visions” of seeing her mother living a different life, alive and no one will believe her.

Jonathan must “prove’ his wife is dead through the courts in order to collect much needed insurance money. Billie was his heart, the spark that made their family burn bright, or was she? Together with Olive, Jonathan, while unable to connect with his daughter begins a journey into discovering who and what the woman who left them behind really was. What they discover is not the picture they need for their hearts, but a woman who lived life by her own rules, consequences be damned.

Was she the ultimate free spirit or was she a selfish individual who hid her indiscretions, built false images that her child could not live up to and didn’t have the integrity to face her own lies head on. Was she even capable of love of others?

WATCH ME DISAPPEAR by Janelle Brown is dark, gritty and at times, painful to slog through as a husband and daughter discover the secrets one woman kept hidden under the rug. It is a sour tale of families failing to nurture one another and being fooled into the ease of ignoring the truth of their lives.

I failed to connect with the husband who was more concerned with infidelities than his own daughter’s floundering in her own feelings of inadequacy caused by her mother’s expectations and verbalized disappointments. Dark and brooding, this read was too slow and even the mystery of “Billie” wasn’t enough to make me believe in this tale.

I received an ARC edition from Random House Publishing Group in exchange for my honest review.

Page Numbers Source ISBN: 0812989465
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau (July 11, 2017)
Genre: Women's Fiction
Print Length: 369 pages
Available from: Amazon | Barnes & Noble
For Reviews & More: http://tometender.blogspot.com

“…how can you ever really know the truth about another person? We all write our own narratives about the people we know and love…”

Billie Flanagan is living the good life in Northern California. Her husband, Jonathan, has a lucrative career that permits her to stay home, even though Olive is now in middle school. But one day she heads out on one of her favorite hiking trails, the Pacific Crest Trail in Desolation Wilderness, and she never returns. Search and Rescue crews find a single hiking boot and a cell phone far below the trail with its screen smashed. Her bank cards and checking remain untouched. Jonathan and Olive are forced to face the truth: Billie is never coming home again. They hold the funeral, and a year later, Jonathan sits down to write a memoir of his life with Billie. It is here that we join the family.

Many thanks go to Net Galley and Random House for the invitation to read in exchange for this honest review. The book will be available to the public July 11, 2107.

This psychological thriller starts with daughter Olive, who is in middle school, seldom a proud or happy time for any of us. But one day Billie appears to Olive in the hallway and tells her that she should be looking harder; she isn’t trying. Olive is convinced that her mother is still alive and trying to reach her. Eventually Jonathan starts to wonder as well. Neither of them is able to move on effectively without knowing the truth, yet there it is: they have no body and they have no proof, yea or nay. As their journeys unfold, both externally and internally, Brown develops the hell out of both of these characters and through the memories both evoke in word and thought, she develops Billie best of all. An interesting side character named Harmony rounds things out nicely.

As each layer of each character is revealed—I was planning to say it’s like having three sets of Russian nesting dolls, but that’s not right; each has many more layers than that, more like an onion—the reader’s viewpoint is forced to shift from one point of view to another, and so we wonder at various times about alternative possibilities. Could Billie really be alive somewhere? Did she just up and leave them? She’s done that before. She is a runner. She has been known to drop people with no warning at all, just ghost them. It was a long time ago, but it’s true.

Or is she dead at the hands of…hmm, the ex-boyfriend that surfaces at the funeral? And we wonder whether maybe Jonathan, whose memories of Billie are not all as rosy as the ones we hear at the outset, did something to harm her. And then we wonder about Billie’s friend Harmony, who moves into Jonathan’s life rapidly enough to disturb Olive considerably. She’s so needy, so hungry for his attention; would she have offed Billie in order to have a crack at him? Many of these ideas are merely hinted at rather than voiced by the narrative, and this is part of what makes it so tasty. At first, I think my idea is original because I am so smart, but then I look back, as a reviewer has to do, and I can see it’s not really about my being smart (darn), but rather about very subtle foreshadowing. Brown uses lights and mirrors to get our minds moving in different directions, and the disorientation is, in its own twisted way, part of the rush.

A last note goes to the tangential but rarely-seen moment when a character muses about why it’s so hard to find an abortion clinic when you need one. This is the reverse side of a pet peeve of mine, the notion that every accidental pregnancy necessarily must end in childbirth, as if the year were 1950 or 1960 rather than the 21st century. I wonder whether Brown had to fight to keep that reference in her novel? One way or the other, this was going to be a five star review, but when I found that courageous little nugget, I wanted to shout for joy!

As to the end…I can’t tell you what happens of course, but I will tell you that this doesn’t end ambiguously. By the conclusion, the reader knows what happened to Billie.

When all is said and done, this is fiction that every feminist can embrace. If there is a heaven, Charlotte Perkins Gilman is looking down, and she is cheering.

I would like to thank Janelle Brown, Random House and Netgalley for giving me this book for my honest review!
Review By Stephanie
I love love a good prologue and Janelle gave me a great one in Watch Me Disappear! The story of this family visiting a monarch butterfly preserve grabbed my attention. This prologue painted the picture of love, family and fun and happiness....but that was the last time this family has a happy family vacation......Mommy goes on a hike by herself and never comes back...
A year later Jonathan and his daughter Olive are still dealing with the "death". Olive starts having "visions" of her mom and she thinks it is because her mother is trying to send her a message that she is alive and needs help. Jonathan is writing on a grief memoir when he starts getting some of the same vibes that Olive is getting about Billie.........and this is where the fun begins!
Janelle did an amazing job writing a gripping tale that will keep you glued to your kindle until the very last word! The writing, characters and storyline is so complex and amazing! Watch Me Disappear is a great book for everyone beach bag!!

Billie Flanagan waves goodbye to her family and heads off on a backpacking trip in the wilderness, alone. Billie doesn’t come back… The secrets and lies, guessing games and twists made for an intriguing and worthwhile reading journey.
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