I always look forward to Carola Lovering's books and was really excited to read this one. i enjoyed it alot! Thank you so much for the opportunity to read and review this one. Can't wait for the next one!

I read this book in 1 day. I was racing to get to the end. I was on the edge of my seat. Part love story part suspense. This book was a winner.

Felt very formulaic and predictable but I still enjoyed the story and most of the characters. It makes for a good quick beach read.

This story is not a thriller. The title and cover photo make you feel there might be “more” around every twist but nope that’s not this kind of story

On the other hand I did like The story. It’s follows Molly and the love of her life Jake back when they were 23 and present day of Molly and her husband Hunter. The story is told from 3 perspective in two different time lines. The 3rd narrator is Sabrina who is obsessed with Stella and not in a good way.
I don’t want to give too much away but I am happy with the ending.

Thank you NetGalley for the arc copy of this story.

I was totally drawn in by this domestic suspense!! It was hard for me to put down. I loved the different POVs of Jake, Molly and Sabrina. I also enjoyed the past/present time line. I do wish it would have been a little more twisty, but that’s a personal preference!! I could totally see this one as a movie.

I’ve been a big fan of Carola Lovering ever since I read and loved Tell Me Lies. For some reason her books always get marketed as thrillers, but I’d say they’re all (this one included) more of a domestic drama/suspense.

Things I loved:
-multiple narrators and dual timelines. You get POV from Molly, Jake and Sabrina - the three that have a complicated web of a story weaved among them
-SO good on audio with multiple narrations
-don’t know who to trust - lots of sketchy decisions made by the characters - some made me roll my eyes, some made me happy about the way it took the story
-loved that Jake was a front man in a bad, loved hearing about touring, the band politics etc
-was surprised by some parts of the ending and loved how it all unfolded

Things that weren’t my favourite:
-didn’t love the epilogue and I don’t know what I would have preferred instead, but it was just underwhelming after such a fun ending

I really enjoyed this novel, personally I would highly recommend it. It was interesting and entertaining. It kept me wanting more throughout the entire book!

A story of love gone wrong. It is a psychological thriller x10. Jake Danner is the dream guy- singer/songwriter that makes all the girls swoon. At a concert one night him and Molly lock eyes and it is love at first sight. Unfortunately, he is a musician and travels all the time. Now, years later she has moved to another town and meets a new friend. This friend though is out to dig up all her secrets. It was a fast read although predictable.
Thank you Netgalley for a copy in exchange for an honest review. All thoughts are my own.

I feel like there wasn't anything very suspenseful or thrilling about this book. It's frustrsting to me when I start a book expecting a thriller and I don't get one (thanks Goodreads. 😂) I would classify this as a domestic drama.

Some things I actually enjoyed: the author referenced neighborhoods and actual places in Brooklyn that I actually know (many of them being in my old neighborhood!) I also visualized this book turning into a Netflix series the entire time I read it.

Now, here's where I started to take issue: because I think it'll make for a good TV series, I felt that the writing for a book was a bit contrived. You ever get that feeling where an author has a hunch that their book will be picked up for screen time? That's how I felt reading Can't Look Away.

This was an entertaining read, but that's about it. 🤷🏼‍♀️

Many thanks to NetGalley, St. Martin's Press and Carola Lovering for my ARC of Can't Look Away in exchange for my honest review!

Ooh time goes by and if i don't write the review right away...sigh. I'm trying to be better. The best i can do right now is give a star count...

This is an interesting domestic suspense story. It's billed as a thriller, but falls a bit short in that area. The story of Molly, Jake, and Sabrina is told through their three points of view, which worked well for me. The storyline also jumped between 2013 and 2022, which provided important context to the character development and relationships. The dual timeline kept the pace up, and set up an ending full of emotion. I enjoyed it - but as a domestic drama, not a thriller.

I'm stopping at 60%. This is a Lifetime movie, not a thriller. This is messy, crazy, rich, white people who are all painfully selfish. I cannot read any more infidelity masked as "impossible to stop" or another sentence talking about how bone-meltingly hot the male lead is. I do not like any of the characters, other than maybe Hunter and Stella, and I don't want things to work out for any of them. I skipped ahead to see if I knew the "twist" and yeah - if you've ever seen a Lifetime drama, you know how it ends. Too easy to guess, to annoying to read, I'm calling it quits.

**Thank you NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for the eARC**

3 stars because this didn’t read like a thriller. I was expecting more twists and turns and suspense but the story was very straightforward and not surprising. The characters’ actions were frustrating and there wasn’t a lot of page turning action here.

2.5 stars. Despite the description calling this book "sexy suspense" and the slightly ominous cover and title font, make no mistake: Can't Look Away is a domestic drama, not a thriller, and it is a fairly standard domestic drama at that. At the center of the story are Molly, Jake, and Sabrina. Molly and Jake were together for a few years in their early 20s, but their passionate love couldn't withstand the everyday trials that tore it apart. Years later, Molly has settled with her husband and daughter in an upscale Connecticut suburb, when she meets Sabrina during one of the yoga classes she teaches. Sabrina has recently moved to town with her husband, and Molly doesn't know it, but their meeting wasn't by chance -- and she's keeping explosive secrets that threaten to upend everything Molly holds dear.

Carola Lovering is adept at writing realistic, complicated relationships, particularly the "first love" or "twin flame" sort that ooze toxicity. She did this best, in my opinion, in her first novel Tell Me Lies, but these types of relationships are at the center of all three of her books. For me, Can't Look Away was the least successful, although there is still a lot here to appreciate. The characters are complex and authentic, if frustrating, and although this is a plot that feels recycled in an over-saturated genre, it's still a compulsively readable book. It's thoughtful and poignant in its exploration of toxic relationships and old wounds. Lovering's writing so clearly conveys the complicated, overwhelming emotion that is love.

Can't Look Away is, essentially, a soap opera in book form, and just like on TV, there are characters that behave in infuriating ways. My issues with this book mostly center around those characters: Sabrina's motives and actions don't really make a lot of sense, and Molly is frustrating because she defines herself entirely by her relationships instead of pursuing her own life goals and ambitions. And the angsty melodrama of it all wore on me after a while -- the book could have been quite a bit shorter if there wasn't so much arguing and then rehashing of those arguments later.

Here's hoping Lovering's next novel can recapture the unique, special qualities of her first. But regardless, I'll continue to read her books; even if I've been disappointed by her recent offerings, there's something so compelling in the way she writes about love.

I received an ARC of Can't Look Away by Carola Lovering from St. Martin's Press and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Thank you!
I give this book 5 stars! This was a well-crafted domestic drama about how far someone is willing to go in the name of love and obsession. I enjoyed how the author wove the story, the chapters going between the past and present tying into a crazy ending. This was a one-sitting read for me. A perfect summer read!

This was a great quick read. Molly and Jake met and fell in love but events led to their breakup. The story takes place in the past (2013) and now (2022). Molly is now married to someone else and has a child with him. They live in a wealthy suburb where Molly teaches yoga, which leads to her meeting Sabrina. They become fast friends but Molly doesn't know Sabrina's true agenda.
This book definitely kept the suspense coming and the ending was great. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the advanced reader copy.

Thank you so much to NetGalley for an ARC of this book!

This is my third Carola Levering book and will definitely not be my last. She continues to improve her writing with each book and creates memorable characters that stay with the reader long after the last page.

This book revolves primarily around Molly, the main character, and the significant relationships in her life. The book has different POVs to provide context to different events that impact Molly throughout several years. Sabrina is a married housewife who befriends Molly and Jake is a singer who was Molly's first love. The timeline of the story flips between past and present but the author does a fantastic job of allowing the reader to understand the sequence of events. All of the characters have secrets and the suspense of when these would be revealed kept me fully engaged and anxious to continue reading.

There are several aspects of this book that may cause readers to consider it more of a romance but the secrets kept by everyone leads to several surprising twists along the way.

I absolutely loved this book and fully recommend it. I am looking forward to Carola Levering's next book.

When we first meet Molly Diamond she has gone with a friend to a concert of an up and coming band. She is drawn to the handsome lead singer and his beautiful voice, Jake Danner. Their eyes lock and they are soon a young couple in love. Meanwhile the bands prospects are rising, and the band starts touring. This leads to long absences which strain the two young lovers' relationship. We jump into the future, and Molly is now married to someone named Hunter. Jake is not in her life nine years later. She has a daughter named Stella and teaches yoga. Her dreams of being a published writer seem to have died.

We have three characters giving their point of view: Molly, Jake, and Sabrina. Sabrina is Jake's former girlfriend, and she never got over him. It could be called an obsession. She inserts herself into Molly's world, but doesn't give Molly any indication of her past connection to Jake.

From this point on we switch back and forth between the past and the present. The story of what happened to Jake and Molly's romance will slowly be revealed. Meanwhile, in the present, Sabrina is up to no good and Molly is clueless about this.

When I was reading reviews on Goodreads before writing this, there are a lot of opinions with some common negative themes. I would like to give my opinion on some of these. Many stated that this was called a thriller, but it is actually more of a domestic suspense story. I would agree with this assessment, but I enjoyed the story, and there were enough twists to keep me engaged.

Others said they found the characters unsympathetic. I would diagree.. I liked Molly, the main`character, and although Jake was flawed, he wasn't a horrible person. I did find Molly's level of anger at him a little hard to sympathize with, but I guess the writer didn't want to make Jake too unsympathetic. Her husband Hunter was wonderful. The only unsympathetic character was Sabrina, and she was the villian.

A couple of people objected to IVF being such a plot line, and the fact that Molly desperately wanted a baby, as that was anti-feminist, or whatever. All I can say is they've obviously never lived through that heartbreak.

If you go into the book expecting a twisty domestic suspense novel, and not a thriller, I think you will enjoy this story. I did.

Have you ever wondered what your life would be like if maybe you had made some different choices?

Molly has a pretty good life, with a doting husband and a sweet little girl. They're struggling with fertility, and Molly isn't a huge fan of her neighbors, but at the end of the day things are still going pretty good.

That is until Molly makes a new friend who isn't what she seems, and Molly's past comes back in full force, making her wonder if maybe she made the wrong decisions way back when.

This novel is told from different timelines and different POVs, both of which I love. And like Molly, I have found myself wondering what life would be like if maybe I'd gone down different paths. I think that's human, and Molly's indecisions are a big really why I enjoyed this novel.

While the what ifs really kept me flipping pages, I sometimes struggled with a few of the out of control characters, and I wasn't quite a fan of the ending. Still this story is definitely good enough for a read and I do recommend it.

This book tries to be a lot of things. It's a thriller, sort of, mixed with a romance, sort of, mixed with a story about women's friendship (but not really, they are not friends, one of them actively hates the other). I think that in trying to do too many things, the book never fully becomes any of those things. The thriller aspect of the book I found boring, obvious and not at all shocking. The romance part was ... not that romantic? And the friendship was, as I said, not a friendship. What kept me reading was the back and forth timeline, the way that the story built itself over the course of it, and the fact that I did care, a little, about what happened to Molly. The ending fell flat and I found myself shaking my head, asking myself, "what did I just read?" I have previously really enjoyed this author's work so it was disappointing to find that Can't Look Away did not live up to her previous two novels.