The three main characters in this terrific puzzle are Jonathan, his wife Billie, and their teenage daughter Billie. In the Prologue, we get a hint about Billie’s adventurous nature as she comments to Jonathan as they are watching Olive at the beach: “She’s going to need to grow a thicker skin or she’s going to spend her whole life being too afraid to try anything.”

In the novel, Billie has gone off hiking solo and has disappeared. As months go by, Jonathan is trying to cope with the mysterious loss when Olive begins having vivid dreams that have her convinced her mom is still alive. While Jonathan doesn’t actually wish her dead, he has an interest in having her declared legally dead in order to collect insurance money. It really isn’t possible to tell much about the story without spoiling it, but it is well crafted and kept me guessing until the end (although, admittedly, I am the worst at figuring things out in terms of mystery plotting). So I’ll just try to convey why the experience of reading this was so enjoyable, with some examples of Ms. Brown’s narrative skill.

Olive is revealed to be quite a sensitive teenager. She attends a pricey prep school in the Bay Area, and as she observes some girls who are a couple of years behind her in school, she “wishes she could tell these girls that things get easier, but in her experience they don’t…you just discover that there are even bigger, more complicated problems that you have to solve.”

I love the way Ms. Brown describes teenaged girls, saying they “…are like skittish forest creatures that dance away at your approach, snarl if you dare to confront them head-on. You need to wait, patiently, for them to come to you.”

Brown also captures the upper-middle-class soccer moms whose daughters attend Claremont Prep with Olive. As Jonathan takes on the after-school pickup duties following Billie’s exit, and is suddenly an available male, the”…Claremont Moms are circling. They flutter around Jonathan, a flock of predatory birds in lululemon and boyfriend jeans.”

Not a fast-paced action thriller by any means, but an unraveling story that was a pleasure to read. I appreciate having a copy made available by Random House/Spiegel & Grau and NetGalley in exchange for my honest review. Four enthusiastic stars.

This book has gotten so many good reviews, and has such hype, I was so excited to be given the chance to read it. But then I was immediately disappointed, and the book actually ended up in my Did Not Finish pile. I do have plans to go back and try it again, but from the first couple of chapters, I was getting a paranormal vibe, and thatch not for me. I know I should have pushed on with this one, but for now, I had to put it aside.

While hiking alone, wife (Billie, aka Sibilla) goes missing, so husband (Jonathan) and 16 yo daughter (Olive) search for her. Is it possible that she's still alive? Was she kidnapped? And what's up with Olive's strange visions of her mother?

The premise of this story was intriguing, but in my opinion, it fell flat somewhere along the way. This one is being called a thriller, but since the story progresses so slowly, I think general fiction or mystery would be a better categorization. I definitely enjoyed the author's writing style, and would try another book by her.

Sibilla came across as extremely selfish, and I have a hard time relating to that type of character.

🚨 Drowning alert of a minor character, for those that cannot read about it.

Thank you to the author, the publisher, and NetGalley for a free ARC of this book in exchange for my honest review!

A gorgeous novel about the weight of loss. Billie disappears while hiking and her husband Jonathan and daughter Olive are left to mourn her. They never find a body, but it's impossible for her to have survived so Jonathan and Olive need to put their lives back together without the closure of a funeral. Jonathan then finds out details about Billie's secrets that make him doubt their life together. Meanwhile, Olive starts having visions about her mother that lead her to believe that she may be alive. I am giving this novel 4 stars because it's impeccably written. It has several twists and the characters are solid and well-built. That said, this is not the kind of book I like, as it focusses more on the characters’ thoughts and feelings than the mystery of Billie's disappearance. Readers who enjoy slow-burners will love it.

How well do we actually know the ones we love? If they had secrets that came out after their death, would they totally change the way that we looked at that person or would we just shrug and say “That was just like so and so“. Watch Me Disappear explores those questions in-depth.


Watch Me Disappear is a very well written book about finding out secrets about your loved ones and how those secrets can change how you see your loved one. While the book got off to a very slow start, it more than made up for the first slowness throughout the book. When you learned one thing about Billie and thought it was over with another secret comes to light. Then with all the issues with Olive and Jonathan were having after Billie’s death, the book was very flushed out.

Jonathan, I felt awful for. He was destroyed when Billie went missing on a solo hike. It took him months to even begin to deal with her death. He was struggling to connect with Olive, who had withdrawn after her mother disappeared, and he was struggling to make ends meet. So when his lawyer explained that to legally declare Billie dead, they needed to post an ad in the paper, he wasn’t very happy about it. It was during that time that he found her laptop. It was what he found when he started looking into the laptop that threw him for a loop and made him ask himself this question “Did he even know who Billie was?” The more he found out about her, the more he asked himself that question. He also began to question if she really did die out in the wilderness. Instead, he began to think that maybe, just maybe, she faked her death.

Olive, I also felt awful for. Not only did she miss her mother desperately, but she was starting to see visions of her. The first vision that she saw Billie in was at school and caused Olive to walk into the wall. Olive, desperate to find her mother, starts to search alternative methods to explain the visions that she was having. Olive was so sweet and I wanted to cry when she was searching and she was also finding out that her mother was someone who she didn’t know. I wanted to reach through the book and give her a hug.

I was not expecting the ending. Sure, I was expecting the 1 year later scene, with Olive and Jonathan happy and successful. But what I wasn’t expecting and it kinda blew my mind. You need to read the book to find out what I am talking about.

How many stars will I give Watch Me Disappear: 4

Why: A solid mystery that had a great plot and good characters. Even the flawed ones you couldn’t help but like.

Will I reread: Yes

Will I recommend to family and friends: Yes

Age range: Adult

Why: Language and sex

**I received a free copy of this book and volunteered to review it**

A mom disappears while out on hike by herself, and so begins the is she, or isn't she dead? Has she started a new life? Is her daughter seeing visions? There are just too many plot twists/red herrings that make this more of an exhausting read, and towards the end you feel like if she is alive, then she sure is a selfish woman who created chaos and disasters for those she left behind. I hoped the whole time she would be dead because orchestrating her disappearance would have been too cruel to her family. Ending won't be shared...

Fans of Gone Girl and Girl on a Train will love this great suspenseful read that leaves you guessing until the very end. Billie Flanagan went for a hike a year ago and never came back which tore her family apart. As her husband and daughter try and rebuild their shattered lives by having Billie declared dead they soon discover that they may not have ever really known Billie / Mom at all.

Thank You to Spiegel & Grau for proving me with an advance copy of Janelle Brown's novel, Watch Me Disappear, in exchange for an honest review.

PLOT- Jonathan's wife, Billie, disappeared on a hiking trip nearly a year ago. Her body was never recovered and he is now going through courts to have her death certificate issued, so that he can file an insurance claim. He's running through his savings and falling behind in bills; money is an enormous stress. He'd love to drowned his troubles in alcohol, but he must pull it together for Olive, his teenage daughter. Olive's grief has started manifesting itself in visions, where she believes that she's not only seeing her mother, but that her mother is still alive and needing her help. Jonathan discovers information about Billie's past that leads him to believe that she might not be the person that he thought he had married, and that perhaps, she really is still alive.

LIKE- I'm a fan of Janelle Brown's writing and I was happy to be approved for her latest novel. I admire Brown's ability to write emotionally rich scenarios and compelling characters. Watch Me Disappear has quite a few plot twists and reads like a mystery, but at its core, it's character driven. 

I felt most connected to Jonathan, who has the weight of the world on his shoulders and is really struggling to keep his life together. He's not a perfect parent (who is?), but he sincerely tries to make Olive's life better and the two have a beautiful connection. Watch Me Disappear is told primarily in close third-person that alternatively focuses on Jonathan, Billie, and Olive. However, there is a story device in which Jonathan and Billie's relationship is remembered in first person, through a memoir that Jonathan is writing. I'm not sure that the memoir entries added much to the story. I felt that they slowed the pace. However, they also drew me closer to Jonathan, as I was able to hear his direct voice. I was more interested in Jonathan and Olive's reaction to their predicament, than I was about the character of Billie. 

DISLIKE- There was a confusing element early in the story when I thought that Watch Me Disappear might turn into a fantasy novel. It was the combination of Billie giving Olive books about telepathic kids and then having Olive experience her visions. I spent the first half of the novel expecting it to go an entirely different direction. 

I really disliked the character of Harmony. Harmony is a long-time friend of Billie. She has the hots for Jonathan and now that her friend is dead, she is making her move on him. The scenario of a woman coming on to a grieving widow is bad enough, but the storyline with Harmony with regard to Billie's mysterious past, becomes a muddled mess at the end of the story. I didn't so much dislike the ending, but it was a onslaught of information and characters creating an overly complicated explanation.

RECOMMEND- Maybe. I didn't absolutely love Watch Me Disappear, but I enjoyed it. It's a fast read with unexpected twists; a solid blend of mystery and family drama. I like Brown's writing and I'd recommend her other novels.

It’s been a year since Sybilla “Billie” Flanagan disappeared while on a solo hiking trip. Missing and presumed dead, her grieving husband and teenage daughter have been left to pick up the shattered pieces of their lives. Then one day at school, Billie’s daughter has a vision: her mother is alive, somewhere out there, and needs Olive to come find her. Jonathan, Billie’s husband, initially dismisses the idea that Billie is still alive. After all, he has just recently been able to accept the fact of her death. But then a chance encounter with one of Billie’s friends reveals that his wife has been keeping secrets from him for years. The deeper he digs into his wife’s mysterious past, the more uncertain he becomes about the woman he married, and whether she did actually perish a year ago.

This is a tight, subtle thriller. We know Billie, former wild child turned Berkeley super mom by the holes she left in the lives of those around her. While Olive and Jonathan work in their own ways to find out what happened to Billie, we see her surface persona slowly scraped away, and something different and darker start to show through underneath. Every revelation about who Billie was adds more mystery, rather than less, to her ultimate fate. Through the course of the book, you find yourself very smugly sure that so-and-so knows what happened to Billie, only to have that assumption ripped away a few chapters later, and your focus moved on to a new suspect.

Fans of mysteries and thrillers will probably enjoy this book. The story has several elements in common with Gone Girl. If you’ve enjoyed books in that vein, this is a good pick for you.

An advance copy of this book was provided by the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I will be posting my review on Goodreads on June 14, 2017.

This was a fascinating book that follows the story of Billie, a beautiful supermom living in Berkeley, who disappears into thin air while hiking one Autumn day. She leaves behind a loving husband and teenage daughter who are suffering because of their loss. The book kept you guessing for a long time about who Billie or Sybilla really is and what really happened to her that day since she went missing. Is she really dead or she is held captive somewhere, or worse did she just run off and leave her family behind?The writing was crisp and the author made it look easy to write from the point of view of a man, a woman, and a teenage girl. I found the story believable due to the author's excellent writing though the story was highly not likely to happen in reality. Aside from the unique storyline and fleshed out characters, the Mom and daughter were both fans of Lois Duncan. Aaack.. I loved Lois Duncan books as a pre teen in the 1979:).. Kudos on a fantastic book-I highly recommend.

I really loved this book. At first it seemed a little slow to get going, but then boom! It took off. The writing was superb and kept me wanting more for the entire time I was reading and got better as the story progressed. I kept trying to figure out what happened to Billie, but just when I thought I knew, the story made me think twice. The last chapter before the Epilogue had me feeling like there was something missing, it wasn't the great ending I was expecting, but then I read the Epilogue and OMG! That was what I am talking about. Now, i am just hoping that there will be a second book so that this story can continue because it is clearly not finished. Please please please let there be a second book. Thank you, that is all :)

I really enjoyed this book. It was slow to start but really peaked my interest. I loved the character driven narrative and only wished for more closure for Jonathan. I felt like Jonathan's story line peaked and then speed up to close up the story line. I loved the epilogue so the reader was not left hanging.

Watch Me Disappear was the best book I've read this summer. Twisting, turning, intriguing... you have no idea where it's going to end up, and that's hard to find in a book now. Loved every second of reading it and can't wait for more.

Well looks like I found a new author to stalk this year. First of all thank you for allowing me to read this early, I am honored. Excuse me tho while I "GOOGLE" the author and purchase her other books.

So diving into this one, I could tell from the first mysterious chapter that Billie was going to be one complicated woman. I was right.

What I am finding lately in regards to the mystery/thriller/suspense genre is missing girls or missing women. No matter what happens between Page 1 and the last page, we aren't focusing so much on what each author is trying to tell us. There are hints and clues missed because ultimately we just want to find out what has happened.

This is not that kind of story.

This book quickly sets into a year after Billie has gone missing and focuses on her husband, Jonathan and their daughter, Olive. We do see some grieving still, but it really has a small and well-written supernatural element when Olive questions if she's psychic and seeing Billie. This isn't over the top or a huge buzzkill for me. In fact, I really liked it.

Told between alternate chapters of Olive's life and her journey with trying to find her mother as well as her life as a high school student and a memoir Jonathan is writing about his life with the woman who is presumed dead and never to be seen again, this really kept me on my toes. There wasn't huge cliffhanger endings in the chapters, there weren't constant dead-end clues. There were just two really fantastic characters looking to find their lost loved one and finally get some answers.

As a domestic thriller/fiction novel, I was kind of glad there wasn't a ton of suspense or thriller elements to this one as it was really nice to focus on the two characters and what they are experiencing. Don't get me wrong, Billie is still a huge element to this book but Jonathan and Olive are the ones we really get to take this journey with.

I won't lie, at times during this one I felt like I was given more information than I needed to know and thought this might be some filler pages to get to where we were meant to be with this one. I was wrong. Everything is wrapped up with a neat little bow at the end of this one and the very last page made my jaw drop.

This is definitely a great summer read and it reminded me somewhat of "When She Was Gone" by Gwendolen Gross. I actually would recommend both reads.

I had trouble connecting with the characters in this book. A woman goes on a solo hike on the Pacific Crest Trail and never comes home. Only her boot is found. Her husband and 16 year old daughter are left to cope as best they can. A year passes. The daughter begins “seeing” her mother in some sort of hallucination/waking dream. The husband begins to discover his wife was telling him lies. No one seems to know who the “real” Billie Flanagan was. The whole premise of the book is how much do we really know those we love.

The writing was decent and there wasn't anything fundamentally wrong with this book. It just never truly grabbed me, although the second half of the book, as the husband begins to investigate Billy’s past, is much more interesting than the first half.

My thanks to netgalley and Random House for an advance copy of this book.

Need a vacation read this summer? Here it is...one day, Billie, wife to Jonathan and mother to Olive, heads out for a hike and does not return. A year later, Jonathan has quit his job to write a memoir of their life, struggling to make ends meet while he fights to obtain a death certificate, never having found a body. Yep, he needs the insurance money to make a few payments. Meanwhile, Olive is having visions of her mother desperate for help, leaving breadcrumbs of clues about her secretive past. We see the husband's struggles as he investigates their finances and the burgeoning relationship with his wife's best friend, as well as Olive's high school issues and her dawning awareness of her own sexual identity. As author Janelle Brown slowly reveals Billie's life, we see the clues that Jonathan needs to follow to find the truth. Admittedly, this began a bit slowly for me; it took me until about 50 pages to really get pulled into the story. Then it was a rockin' ride until the end, with some intriguing twists and turns and a few 'ah-ha' moments. Don't put this book down; the ending will satisfy and amaze you.

4 out of 5 stars to [book:Watch Me Disappear|32740062], a new mystery and suspense thriller, set to be published on July 11, 2017 and written by [author:Janelle Brown|970639]. Many thanks to the author, NetGalley, Random House and Spiegel & Grau for this Advanced Reader Copy (ARC) in exchange for a fair an honest review.

<b><i><u>Why This Book</u></i></b>
I saw this book floating around on Goodreads, which prompted me to read the description. I checked NetGalley to see if it was available and was awarded the request back in April. I had a few other reads to complete before it, but settled in last week to be able to release the review a few weeks before its publication, as part of an effort to promote the book.

<b><i><u>Approach & Style</u></i></b>
The book is told mostly in the present tense, which is not something I have experienced very oftenl however, it worked very well given the suspense and thriller aspects.

I read it via Kindle Reader on my iPad. It is about 5000 lines or 350 pages.

It is mostly told in a third-person point of view and switches focus on a few different characters. There are also 5 chapters which are news articles that one character writes as part of the book he is publishing. These serve to connect different story points and keep the momentum of what's happening behind the scenes.

<b><i><u>Plot, Characters & Setting</u></i></b>
Billie and Jonathan have been married for nearly 20 years and they have a 16-year-old daughter named Olive. They live in the East Bay on the outskirts of San Francisco, California. As the story starts, it's been almost one-year since Billie went missing after she was on a hike, leaving behind her husband and daughter to wonder if she was kidnapped or died somewhere in the forest, as a body was never found.

Billie grew up in a very religious family as an only child. She ran away from home a few times, and after father, a minister, was caught with a teenage girl, Billie left for good. She told her friends that he was an awful father and abused her from time to time. She became a free spirit and helped protect the environment and animals from disasters and corruption. One day, she meets Jonathan and after 6 weeks, they get married and later have a baby. She loves him, but seems to struggle settling down, often needing her free time away from the family life. Jonathan had a sister, but she drowned when they were children, and he's always felt guilt for not being able to save her. Years later, when he meets Billie, he's drawn to her and they quickly settle into a life where it's just the 3 of them.

Harmony, Billie's former best friend shows up at some point, trying to re-build her friendship with Billie. She also later tries to help Olive and Jonathan move on after Billie's death, offering both friendship and an attraction to Jonathan. Olive's best friend, Natalie, also tries to help Olive get over her mother's loss. But one day, Olive has a weird vision where she thinks her mother is trying to be found. Jonathan doesn't want to deal with it, as he believes Billie is dead, and needs the money from her life insurance to be able to afford to pay for their mortgage and raise Olive. But suddenly, as he begins throwing Billie's things away one year later, he finds notes and files that indicate she may not have been as honest with him as he thought. Jonathan begins to believe Olive and they search for Billie, learning various bits of information which cast Billie into a darker shadow.

The book is a quest for Olive and Jonathan to move on from Billie's death, but also to determine whether she is indeed alive or if something darker has happened to her when she supposedly went for the hike. It's a psychological thriller, leaving readers to question which information is accurate and which is just a red herring. In the end, Jonathan and Olive find a great deal of answers, learn what Billie had been up to in the last year of her life and figure out how to move on from the entire situation. You also find out exactly what happened to Billie when she went on her hike "to get some space for a few days."

<b><i><u>Strengths</u></i></b>
The story is captivating and draws you in around the 20% mark. You really want to know what happened to Billie. Jonathan and Olive are likable characters whom you want to find answers in order to be able to move on with their lives. Both are written as believable father and daughter. There are tons of personal details about their lives, including when Billie was home with them. You see this from both a parent's and a lover's perspective. The story engages you and pushes you to decide what kind of a person you want Billie to turn out to be.

It's a real-life situation for the most part. How do you move on when someone you love is missing and you don't know if they are dead or alive? All the right questions and emotions come up. It's fantastic that the story starts nearly one year after she's missing so we don't have to live through the initial phases of misery and loss. We see and feel the pain, but it's the kind you've already nursed, and then it's ripped open when evidence shows that she may still be alive.

I did like the character of Billie, but it was because of solid writing. And I'm not saying she's done anything wrong related to the disappearance (no spoilers!). I didn't like her because she seemed selfish to need so much time alone, to seem callous about showing her feelings to Jonathan at times, for treating everything as "that's life, we'll figure it out." I wanted to see the motherly side of her where she cries and yells and wants to help her child. Instead, she seemed too much of a free-spirit who just went with the flow. Sometimes it's good, but Billie took it too far in my opinion. But that means the writer did an awesome job pushing me to feel this way.

<b><i><u>Concerns</u></i></b>
I don't think the character of Harmony was flushed out as much as necessary. As you learn more, she feels a bit deeper, but overall, it was a bit of a missing component.

I know we needed Olive, Jonathan and Billie to seem like the only people around in the family, but where were Jonathan's family and his friends. They seemed AWOL at a time they were likely needed.

When the book ends, there are a few parts left too open for me. I want to know specifically what was true and what was false in regard to Billie's early days of running away. She told one story. Another character told a different story. Seeing the whole picture, I struggled a little in deciding who to believe. Even in the end. But it was just a little bit, nothing to throw the story off.

I wasn't too big a fan of the newspaper articles interspersed throughout the chapters. They didn't seem to serve as strong a plot device as I thought they could or should. It helped me learn more about how Jonathan felt about Billie, but at the same time, I think I'd have preferred a journal entry, a conversation with a psychiatrist or even him just saying things aloud. It wasn't distracting, but I didn't get a lot from it.

<b><i><u>Author & Other Similar Books</u></i></b>
It's the first book I've read by the author, but she's written two other books before this one. I would be interested in reading them as I liked her style. I plan to look them up and read if the plot sounds strong.

This book is not a thriller in that you are scared or afraid of someone being hurt. It's more suspenseful, trying to figure out what is really going on. In that vain, it's like The Girl on the Train or Gone Girl. You wonder for a while if you can trust the narrator. Maybe you can, maybe you can't. I won't say. But you get that feel from the book.

<b><i><u>Questions & Final Thoughts</u></i></b>
The title is super-important, as you'd expect. She disappears. You question the entire time you're reading the book... "Who is saying those words." Is is the mother, the daughter or the father? It could be any one of them. I liked that aspect. It's the perfect title, also because the word "disappear" can mean so many things: physically, emotionally, due to fear, due to memory loss... really engaging for those reasons. It got a 4 of 5 stars from me as there were some concerns and I struggled to stay focused in the first 15%. But once it got into the swing of things, I only put it down one other time, as I was very sleep. But I read the last 50% all in one sitting, so it's definitely got game!

<b><i><u>About Me</u></i></b>
For those new to me or my reviews... here's the scoop: I read A LOT. I write A LOT. And now I blog A LOT. First the book review goes on Goodreads, and then I send it on over to my WordPress blog at https://thisismytruthnow.com, where you'll also find TV & Film reviews, the revealing and introspective 365 Daily Challenge and lots of blogging about places I've visited all over the world. And you can find all my social media profiles to get the details on the who/what/when/where and my pictures. Leave a comment and let me know what you think. Vote in the poll and ratings. Thanks for stopping by. <i>Note</i>: All written content is my original creation and copyrighted to me, but the graphics and images were linked from other sites and belong to them. Many thanks to their original creators.

Watch Me Disappear initially seemed like it was going to be a thriller in the vein of Gone Girl - a woman has gone missing and is presumed dead. As the first anniversary of her disappearance into the wilderness approaches, Billie’s husband and daughter do some investigating to see if she’s actually alive. They find that her life is not all it appears to be, keeping secrets even from her closest family members.

The book’s perspective jumped between the husband and daughter, Jonathan and Olive. Jonathan is a journalist who has given up his relatively cushy job at a publication, following his wife’s presumed death, to work on a memoir about his life with Billie. Olive is a private school student dealing with some mean girls, feelings for her best friend, and sudden visions of Billie asking for Olive to find her.

I found that I didn’t care for any of the characters in this story. They felt disjointed and it seemed like the author was trying to include too many things at once. Olive’s supernatural visions and visits to a local psychic were a weird inclusion and didn’t fit with the tone of the book.

I’d recommend it to fans of Gone Girl, and while not specifically YA, I feel like the inclusion of Olive’s POV makes it suitable for older YA readers looking for a thriller.

Great suspense...kept me not wanting to put it down. Awesome twist!