The Dark Red Heart of a Killer

Abbott’s latest dark thriller is about two young brilliant female scientists vying for a spot on a prestigious PMDD study.

Kit and Diane are inexplicably bound by a secret that Diane shares with Kit while both girls are still in high school. It’s a secret that threatens both of them and one that follows each girl as they make their way through school and college into the University funded labs in which they choose to work.

Diane and Kit are reunited after their schooling when they both go to work for a regaled female scientist. The connections between certain characters extend back through time and serve to heighten the suspense as we are steered toward an inevitable end.

Abbott probes the underbelly of complex female emotions, the acts that follow them and the misunderstandings of the female-male relationships.

BRB Rating: Read It

I wanted to like this book, I really did. I normally like everything Abbott writes. But this...this was a train wreck to me. I didn't like ANY of the characters. I found myself speed reading so I could get to the end. This just didn't do it for me at all. I wish it had.

If you like a book about deep dark secrets than this is the book for you. For me this book had a very slow start. There were times that I was thinking about bailing on it but I wanted to know what the secret was. When I found out what the secret was I wanted to keep reading and see if there were anymore secrets between the two main characters. In the end I felt like something was missing.
Thank you Netgalley and Little, Brown and Company a chance to review this book!

As teens, Kit and Diane were bonded by ambition; working hard to attain a scholarship offered by a renowned scientist. Just as they’re about to reach the pinnacle of academic success, Diane spills a secret that tears Kit’s life apart.

Years pass and Kit has worked hard to put the past behind her and create the life she’s always dreamed of. But all that changes when Diane weaves herself into Kit’s life once more. Knowing their past, can Kit and Diane co-exist or is the damage of the past truly irreparable?

It’s no secret around these parts that I’m a big fan of Mighty Megan. She truly has some of the more memorable and beautifully tragic prose around – some of the best I’ve read since Chandler, which makes each new release a cause for celebration. Taking nothing away from her prior novels, I think Give Me Your Hand is her best work to date.

What I value the most as a reader above all else is pacing. With Give Me Your Hand, Megan makes it clear from the outset that she’s going to make you wait. By jumping backward and forward in time through alternating chapters, Megan is able to develop her characters both before and after the secret is revealed, which heightened the anticipation. This drove me crazy (in a good way)!. I had a very hard time putting it down through its brisk three hundred and fifty pages.

Megan has shown in the past through her novels Dare Me, You Will Know Me, The End of Everything and The Fever, that she excels by taking the captivating elements of noir and injecting them into an unfamiliar setting – adolescent girls in suburbia. Give Me Your Hand is no exception. While she still lingers around the halls of a high school in the earlier years of Kit & Diane’s friendship, she then shifts the setting to a research lab in the present day giving her ample room to expand Kit & Diane’s world as well as showcasing a unique backdrop for a white-knuckle thriller.

Give Me Your Hand is an absolutely enthralling read that gripped me from beginning to end. If I read a more riveting novel in 2018, I would be shocked. It’s that good.

Kit and Diane are in high school and become fast friends. Because of Diane, Kit's ambitions become higher and higher. Diane shares a secret with her and it changes EVERYTHING. GASP

Fast forward 10+ years, and Kit is working on those higher ambitions. Diane comes along and becomes her competition for a prestigious research position. Will this destroy them both?

One of my annoyances as a reader is when a book is based on one thing. Seriously, every part in this book was Kit thinking about or telling someone that she knew Diane had a DEEP, DARK SECRET in her past. It became a distraction and took away from the rest of the story. I thought the research part was cool, but the author and Kit are so focused on when the secret is going to come out. I wish I would have liked it more because so many great elements were there, but again, DEEP, DARK SECRET.

Thank you NetGalley for the opportunity to read an advance copy of Give Me Your Hand in exchange for an honest review. It was the first Megan Abbott book I have read and though YA is not my first choice for reading enjoyment, it is probably best for the level for most of my students.

Kit and Diane meet at camp, are sort of sports rivals, but in a way that makes both of them better than they would be alone. They share an intense interest in science, too, unusual for books about high school level girls/young women. The secrets they share stay with them throughout the book.

This science interest becomes a rivalry as both compete to work with the same mentor, while the secrets eat away at them both in different ways. I liked reading about science as a different background to a story line and was glad to learn about PMDD, something new to me.

Megan Abbott, without fail, writes words that keep readers on the edge of their chair while reading. She is a master at psychological suspense, and just keeps getting better and better. And once again, she proves that secrets are dangerous.

Diane and Kit are bound together beginning in high school - each with a secret - one horrifying and the other detrimental to a relationship. Who has the worst secret and how do they deal with it when they meet up again as professionals working together? This book will keep you guessing til the end.

This is a great suspenseful story with a unique setting in the world of laboratory science. I enjoyed that it was so different and thankful for the satisfying ending.

Give Me Your Hand is a fantastically written page turner that will keep readers gripping the pages for hours. I simply could not get enough of this book and I know many readers are going to feel the exact same way as I did. I highly recommend it.

4.5 stars

** Full review to come on release **

Thank you NetGalley for the opportunity to preview Give me your Hand by Megan Abbott.
Abbott is one of the most influential writers for young women at this time. She brings fresh and interesting characters to life and puts them in the most unpredicable circumstances.
Two young women become unlikely friends during high school. They are both bright and love science. But their friendship ends abruptly until they meet again many years later.
But this friendship is over and they are in for the fight of their lives that may just wind up killing them both.
I think Abbott fans will like this one. For me, it is a YA book and not my genre but must say it is written well and as usual, Abbott is very clever with her writing style.

Megan Abbott delivers a fresh, powerful and intriguing novel with richly developed characters and tons of twists. An irresistible read.

Astoundingly good. Megan Abbott is the type of writer that when done with her books I cry a little bit and go "dang, I am glad I coincidentally am on the planet on the same time as her." Few contemporary authors can navigate the hormonal roller coaster of adolescence and subsequent relief yet bittersweet nostalgia that comes with that ending.

Give Me Your Hand by Megan Abbott
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

When she was 17, Kit's friend Diane made a confession to her that chilled her to the bone and almost derailed her life. Now, years later, Kit is a research scientist and Diane has reappeared in her life. Will Kit be able to coexist with Diane with the dark cloud looming over them?

Megan Abbott has been a favorite of mine for the past few years and I pounced on this as soon as I saw it on Netgalley.

Give Me Your Hand is a tale of secrets and the consequences of keeping them. Sooner or later, everything comes back to bite you in the ass. Kit learns this the hard way, as do a lot of the people in her orbit. The story is told in two threads, one in high school, the other in the present day. It's a departure from her recent run of girl-noir books but change is fine in this case.

Diane and Kit were more rivals than friends, both runners, each one of the smartest in their highschool in sleepy Lanister. Yes, Lanister, oddly fitting since I compare the machinations of teenage girls in Megan Abbott's books to Game of Thrones characters. Diane confesses something to Kit that nearly drives her mad. Years later, Kit's on the verge of having the life of a scientist she always wanted when Diane pops up again, a sociopathic bad penny.

This story is doomed to take a dark turn from the start and it does, of course. I always feel like Megan's giving the male part of her audience a secret window into the relationships of teenage girls, infinitely more complex than the comparatively shallow, sex-obsessed psyche of teenage boys. Casual eating disorders and sharing deep secrets seem to be the norm.

We also get a glimpse of how tough it is for women in the science field, both in Kit and Diane's competition with their lab mates and in Dr. Severin, the bad ass female scientist that is practically Wonder Woman to Kit, who seems willing to do anything to get what she wants.

The way Diane's secret is revealed is masterful, doled out in tiny morsels until you can't take anymore. When she shows up in the present day, things quickly veer into the exact wrong direction, like S.E. Hinton by way of Jim Thompson. Then something baffling happens and there are some Telltale Heart moments and things really get tense for a while.

As with her previous books, like Dare Me, You Will Know Me, and The End of Everything, I felt wrung out by the end. While a lot of other crime books get more press, Megan Abbott's are the best thing in the genre today. Five out of five stars.

I work for a major bookseller, so I have of course seen books written by Megan Abbott before, but I'd never read one previously. After reading this one, however, I intend to go back and read previous titles.
I loved this book.
Even with three small kids, work, and a house renovation in progress, I devoured it in less than one weekend. The writing is beautiful-poetic, almost haunting. The story goes back and forth between past and present, and explains the complicated nature of the relationship between the main characters, Kit and Diane. Told from Kit's perspective, the reader learns very early on that a secret of Diane's will be pivotal to their relationship. The characters are so well developed and multi-layered. (Including the secondary characters, who are critical to the plotline and story development). There were times that the story took a few unrealistic turns, but never veered into "completely unbelievable". There were also a few small "mysteries", or questions, throughout, and Ms. Abbott did a fantastic job of answering everything and ending tbe book with a tidy little bow. I honestly can't say enough good things about this book, the author... I don't want to give away too much, especially since I feel the author did such a fine job with pacing. I absolutely cannot wait for this to be released, and I know it will sell fast.