3.5 stars

A year after Billie (Sybilla) Flanagan disappears while hiking alone, leaving only a single boot and a shattered cell phone on the trail, her husband Jonathan and daughter Olive are still trying to make sense of their lives. Olive, fifteen starts having visions of her mother speaking to her, which prompts her to start looking into the possibility of her mom being alive somewhere. At first Jonathan is reluctant to believe her, the possibility of Billie being alive somewhere just seems unfathomable to him, but then something happens to motivate him to look into it on his own and he unearths layers of untruths and half-truths that leave him wondering if we can ever truly know another person.

I really enjoyed this book. It started off a bit slow, but once it got going it moved at a nice steady pace and the writing was fantastic. I loved how real the characters all were, they each had their strengths and weaknesses and distinct personalities, but, at times it felt more like a character study of a very complex woman than a story.

Thank you to NetGalley, Spiegel & Grau and Janelle Brown for the ARC. I am eager to see more of her work in the future.

What a boring book. I had a hard time getting into this book. It wasn't to my liking.

I requested this book based on the description. While Ms. Brown is a talented writer, the heart of the story was muddled by too many red herrings and unnecessary plot twists.

This book had me from the start , but I lost interest, I believe there could have been more suspense added to the story line with more twist and turns

This the first book I've read all summer, The lack of new literary fiction and proliferation of ya novels and Facebook like writing pervades
the market place. I am thinking Watch Me Disappear might be a literary mystery by category, I thought the Berkeley setting was well rendered and the story
moves forward, the denouement is easily figured out ahead of time and the writing is average at best. Seems like a book group pick or pages for a mindless vacation. Three stars, perhaps. IF you still
care about literary fiction both Lauren Groff and Allegra Goodman have stories in The. New Yorker-probably 2 of the best pieces of writing this year.



writing this year.

It's been a while since I read a book I felt like I couldn't put down, but this really fit the bill. I read the whole thing in a weekend because I just had to know what happened next. The characters are compelling and the mystery of what happened to Billie kept me hooked. I will definitely be recommending this book to others.

I haven't left an unfavourable review for any books before this one but I'm sad to say this just didn't click for me. I have tried to persevere on but at 26% read I have given up.
I found it slow and laborious and I was disappointed. This isn't a criticism of the Author just wasn't a book for me.

The facts are simple: Billie went backpacking by herself along the Pacific Crest Trail in Desolation Wilderness. She never came back down the mountain.

I finished Janelle Brown's Watch Me Disappear a week ago, but I needed a little time to marinate on the story before I could review it. This was an emotional novel that follows the people left behind when someone simply disappears. It has been a year since Billie, wife of Jonathan and mother of 15-year-old Olive, failed to return from a solo hike in the wilderness.After an extensive search, the discovery of a few of her belongings in unfavorable conditions and under the recommendation of the authorities, Jonathan and Olive are forced to accept that Billie has died. They are heartbroken, Jonathan is falling apart, Olive is struggling in school. And then the question arises: did Billie really die in alone in the middle of nowhere, or is something else possible?

Even now, a year later, Jonathan is plagued by the question of how long it had taken his wife to die. What if she had lain there for days, somewhere under the ponderosa pines, hurt and helpless, hearing the search helicopters overhead but incapable of summoning them?

With numerous flash backs, this is not simply the story of a missing woman, but of a marriage, how it began and how it progressed over the years. How much do we really know about our partner? It is about the relationship between a mother and her child and how that relationship transforms over the years by necessity.

You don't realize how much you'll miss the asphyxiating intimacy of early parenthood until you can finally breathe again.

This book kept me guessing the whole way through it. Each time I decided I knew how it was going to go, I learned I was wrong. It is the definition of dark and twisty. And when I was finished, I was exhausted. I think that speaks well for a book. Emotional exhaustion means there was emotional investment and what more can an author hope to ask of her readers?

I highly recommend this book, but if you need to talk when you're finished I'm here and I'm dying to discuss it!

I was given the opportunity via NetGalley to read an electronic copy of Watch Me Disappear. I was under no obligation to review this book and my opinion is freely given.

In the year since Billie Flanagan vanished during solo hike in Desolation Wilderness and was presumed dead, her husband Jonathan and daughter Olive have been trying to put the pieces of their shattered life back together. When Olive starts having visions of her mother, still alive, Jonathan starts digging into Billie's past. As father and daughter embark on a quest to put the missing parts to Billie's past together, while searching for her whereabouts in the present, will they finally become a family again?

There were portions of Watch Me Disappear that I really liked, especially when the author places all of the pieces of the puzzle together. The main plot had just the right amount of intrigue and would have been more compelling had the story not been disjointed. The inclusion of Jonathan's writing throughout the book only helped to pull the focus away from Billie's disappearance and the investigation into her past. Olive's personal life was not necessary to the plot and it served only as a distraction. Watch Me Disappear was a good story overall and I would recommend it to readers who enjoy mysteries.

It has been a year since Billie Flanagan has disappeared. Her husband Jonathan and daughter, Olive are still feeling the repercussions of her death. The first half of the book dragged for me. I had a hard time connecting. However, the second half, I finished in hours. I think this author has promise and would read more from her. But there were so many storylines that weren't necessary.
Thank you Netgalley for this read.

Watch Me Disappear by Janelle Brown is a mystery, suspense thriller that I had trouble getting into, and it took me longer than expected to actually finish it. Mystery/Thrillers are my go-to, but there was something with this novel that I just couldn't get into and connect with, whether it be the premise or characters. The premise of this novel offered a lot, and had a ton of potential, but it fell flat for me. It's much more of a character study than a who-dunnit, but the characters personalities and actions just weren't genuine or realistic to me.

http://www.chicklitcentral.com/2017/08/book-review-watch-me-disappear.html

I'm. It sure why this was so much different than I expected but I just couldn't get in to it.

After reading the title description from the publisher, I just had to read this book! It sounded like a real psychological thriller/mystery/suspense book, the kind I love to read.
The beginning started out very slow for me, and didn’t really get going until 35-40 percent into the book. I kept putting the book down because it didn’t hold my interest for very long. There have been a lot of Mystery/Suspense/Psychological Thrillers that have started out this way lately, at least the ones I’ve been reading. Or maybe I'm just impatient.
As for the story, it was good after it started to get going. There were likeable and unlikable characters both. I liked how we saw bits of the past and present brought together, and slowly unfolding the story. Very slowly letting us in on everything, right until the very end. The main characters were all flawed. I found it interesting how the author revealed each and every characters flaws in this one. No one was perfect, and I liked that. As humans we all flawed and make mistakes. Some worse than others and the author shows that to us.
This is the first book I’ve read by Janelle Brown, and I look forward to reading more of this same genre from her. I highly recommend this book to anyone who enjoys a slow burning mystery with a psychological twist. (It’s kind of hard to categorize this book for me; I wouldn’t exactly call it a psychological thriller, as the pace is slower. It's more a mystery, which is slowly revealed).
*A very special thank you to NetGalley and Random House -Spiegel & Gra for the advanced readers copy in exchange for an honest review*

"IT’S A GOOD DAY, or maybe even a great one, although it will be impossible to know for sure later. By that point they’ll already have burnished their memories of this afternoon, polished them to a jewel-like gleam. One of the last days …before Billie died…"

Watch Me Disappear by Janelle Brown
Spiegal & Grau | 2017
Hardcover: 368 pages
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8946-5
Genre: Fiction/Mystery/Missing Persons
Review Source: ARC e-book from Netgalley

Billie and Jonathan Flanagan have been married for 16 years and have reached that stage in their relationship where things have gone stale. Billie rejuvenates herself by trekking in the mountains alone or with a friend. The time comes for a little more “me” time, and she announces she is going alone to a remote section of the Pacific Crest Trail for a few days.

When she doesn’t return, a search discovers her broken phone and a lone hiking boot off the trail. After a lengthy search, she is presumed dead.

A year later, their daughter, Olive, begins to have visions of her mother in various settings that seem to imply her mother is not dead but waiting somewhere to be found. Olive’s erratic behavior and frequent unexcused absences jeopardizes her attendance at an expensive private high school. Some feel it is delayed grief with the anniversary of her mother’s death and others believe she has a medical problem. She is convinced she is a psychic.

Billie cannot be declared officially dead for a year which has left Jonathan in limbo financially. Without a death certificate he cannot receive the life insurance benefits. Shortly before Billie’s death Jonathan had quit his job to follow his dream of writing a book. Now, a year later, without his wife’s income, Jonathan is struggling to pay the bills that include the expensive private school tuition for Olive.

Jonathan has begun the court directed process of “proving” his wife is not dead. In the search through the family’s financial records he discovers secrets his wife has hidden from him. As he peels back the layers of her deception, he discovers a secret life before their marriage.

The mishmash of issues including Olive’s “visions”, financial woes, Billie’s secrets, and Jonathan’s weak-kneed personality seemed so directed and contrived but overall I consider it a nice simple read. If you excuse my vulgarity, the purview of an old woman, I wished Jonathon would grow a pair.

It will come as no spoiler that Billie is still alive, but the reasons why will be a surprise. The ending did make me say, “How about that”. If you are looking for a book with a simple plot that you can take with you to read at the car service center, here you go.

Olive's mother disappears while hiking without a trace. A few months later Olive starts having hallucinations she is still alive and starts trying to find her. Revelations happen. Olive's mother is not who she pretended to be as the old saying goes. I did not think this book worked.

I ended up enjoying this book a lot more than I anticipated. This review is going to be quite hard to write without revealing any spoilers but I am going to try my best.

The beginning was a bit slow and I started getting that sense of dread that this would be one more book added to my dreaded DNF pile - which is why it took me almost two months to finish it. I didn't think I would be able to handle the guilt of adding another book to that pile so soon after that last so I chose to plod on slowly but steadily and about halfway through the plot picked up immensely and I got sucked into the book.

The story touches on a lot of different subjects: family dynamic, marriages and their problems and more importantly - how much do we really know someone? I found this to be the most interesting part of the book. You see your significant other every day, or even your best friend, a co-worker, whoever it is.... but do you really know them?? Who knows what parts of themselves that someone keeps inside, choosing to never share, either from shame or embarrassment, or the sad fact that they feel there is really no one in their life that they can entrust with this information that will not look at them or treat them differently once acquiring this knowledge about them. Personally, I know there are things that I have felt or experienced that I have never talked about with anyone because of these feelings. This book has made me wonder how much I really know the people in my life.

I've been on a trend of reading books with a lot of twists and turns that have kept me guessing and this book continued that trend. Partway through, I thought I had everything figured out and was disappointed as I thought I had spent all this time plodding my way though the novel only to figure it out halfway through and then the story took another twist that had be second guessing myself. I then third and fourth and fifth guessed myself.

I thought this book had good character development with Olive and Jonathan, but honestly I found Billie to be a bit annoying. Like real life, you don't have to love everyone though and this annoyance did not detract from the story at all.

I recommend this book to fans of Gone Girl as I found the writing style slightly similar and that book started off at the same pace.

When I started this book I thought I would hate it. I didn’t care for the narration style. But as I continued to read I found myself growing more and more invested in the mystery. Was Olive really psychic and seeing real visions of her mother? Did Billie fake her death? Was she kidnapped? Murdered? Did she really just fall into a ravine or something equally as tragic and awful while off hiking alone in the woods?

The theories were circling through my head the entire time I read this story. By the time I got to the epilogue, I had to pull my jaw off the ground. Janelle Brown really hit the nail on the head with this amazing ending.

The real central theme of this book is, can you really know someone? Really truly know the real them, not just the mask they wear for the people around them? As Jonathan and Olive dig into Billie’s life and her past, that question begins to really take over Jonathan’s thought process. As he attempts to write the love story he shared with his wife, before her death a year earlier. As he attempts to have her officially, legally, declared dead so he and his daughter can move on. As he begins to dig up more and more of Billie’s secrets…

I really don’t even know what to say in this review because everything I want to gush about will ruin everything for anyone who hasn’t read this book.

I haven’t read a lot of mysteries, but this is one of the better ones I have read and I’d rank Watch Me Disappear almost as high as Gone Girl.

Should you read it? If you like book that keeps you guessing until the last page, THIS is the book for you!!!

Jonathan Flanagan and his teenage daughter, Olive, are still reeling from the disappearance of Billie a year ago. Billie, your typical suburban mom, went for a hike one day and never returned. In the year since she disappeared they had a funeral, Jonathan quit his job to write a book, and Olive misses her mom something fierce. The anniversary has stirred up a lot of emotions and Olive is convinced that she is seeing her mother in visions. She is convinced that it is proof that Billie is not dead. Much to her father's dismay, Olive starts on this quest to find her mother that takes her down all sorts of paths. Jonathan doesn't want to give into his daughter's whims, but there is that one password protected file on Billie's computer that leaves him thinking "what if " and he starts his own investigation into Billie's past. He discovers that there was a side of Billie that he never knew existed. In their quest, both Jonathan and Olive discover that Billie was keeping secrets from them, but is it enough to prove that she really alive?

Watch Me is a slow moving novel that builds these layers of suspicion about Billie. There is never any heart-pounding situations, but the secrets that are revealed are uncovered in a very methodical way. It isn't until you get to the very last pages that you end up thinking "wow, what a good book." The reader only gets to know Billie after she is gone and mostly through the eyes of Jonathan and Olive - both who worshiped her. Billie's best friend Harmony starts to shed some light on the real Billie, but as a reader, I wasn't sure if it was the truth or because Harmony was a little envious of the life that Billie had. I felt so bad for Olive - she seemed so lost without her mother. The author did a great job of communicating the depths of her grief and it was heartbreaking. There are some surprises along the way, but I thought that we had heard them all until the last few pages. - CLICK HERE FOR SPOILERS

Bottom line -- Watch Me Disappear is an intricate look at those left shattered by the death of a loved one. There are so many layers to this story that you have to leave time to digest it all. Definitely, one to add to your "TBR" list.

Details:
Watch Me Disappear by Janelle Brown
On Facebook
Pages: 368
Publisher: Random House
Publication Date: 7/11/2017
Buy it Here!

A woman goes for a solo hike on the Pacific Coast Trail. She doesn't come home. A year later, her teenaged daughter begins seeing her in visions and her husband learns of a secret life his wife led.

I struggled with this book. The plot was very interesting when I picked it up but I developed absolutely no connection with the characters. I felt like the story dragged a bit and I quickly lost interest in it. It took me forever to read it and when I sat down to read, I found myself reaching for other books over this one. I gave it two stars because there was merit in the writing and the plot had promise but it couldn't keep my attention for very long.

*I received an advance reading copy from the publisher in exchange for my honest review. All opinions are my own.*