Thank you NetGalley and Penguin Group Putnam for the ARC for an honest review.

I loved Abbott’s book Dare Me (and the tv series). I was very much looking forward to this new novel.

It fell flat for me. No pulling me in, no keeping me gripped.

Please read and form your own opinions.

Holy fucking hell.

I don't know if I have words for how much I loved this book.

Beware the Woman starts off as a slow burn and gets increasingly creepy and unhinged and I fucking loved it! Possibly my favorite 2023 release this far. If you like feminist fiction and Megan Abbott you need this book..

I was so excited for this book but it ended up falling flat for me.

Thank you NetGalley for eARC in exchange for an honest review

Thank you, Netgalley and Penguin Group Putnam, for gifting me this copy of Beware the Woman.

This book follows a pair of newly weds expecting their first child. Jacy has never met Jeds father, so they decide to take a road trip to the UP to meet him. The cabin in a lush dense woods immediately gives off creepy vibes. Everything seems to be going smoothly when Jacy has a heath scare... good thing Jed's father is a doctor? After that, things begin to change.. was Jeds mom's death an accident, or was something else at play? Jacy starts to feel trapped and figures out the true intentions of Jed's father. This book was really good until the end. I would have given it 4 stars, but it just abruptly ended.. I feel like it needed more.

I'm an unabashed Megan Abbott fan and I know that her style and books aren't for everyone; I say this because she's one of the few writers that's an auto buy for me and not all my friends share my love for her writing. I'm saying this bc I am definitely biased in that she's my type of writer, even thought this a departure from the noir style. She doesn't shy away from characters you'll loathe and not relate to at all. It's not my favorite of hers but I enjoyed it enough that even though the ending knocked off a star, Abbott continues to be a reliably good author.

Reviewed for NetGalley:

I tried and I tried and I tried. But I could not get into this book. The concept was interesting, but fell flat in the all other areas.

Domestic thriller that brings to mind a modern, post-Roe version of The Yellow Wallpaper. While I enjoyed The Turnout, this is a return to (literal) form for Abbott with a more traditional narrative structure and more grounded by virtue of taking place in only one setting — Jacy’s imprisonment becomes yours.

Since I enjoyed Megan Abbott's previous book, The Turnout, I was excited to read Beware the Woman. Unfortunately I was not blown away. During the first half of the novel, nothing much happens. It isn't to the last quarter that secrets are revealed and action ensues. Pregnant Jacy and her new husband, Todd are visiting her father in law, Dr. Ash in the very north peninsula of Michigan. During the first Jacy is at first enamored with Dr. Ash, but as the days pass Jacy realizes Dr. Ash is more than just a protective parent. He becomes obsessed with the baby and finds fault with everything Jacy does. There are secrets in the house and woods that scare Jacy to point of escaping to her home. However, leaving is the one thing Dr. Ash will not allow Jacy to do.

Jed and Jacy travel to the UP of Michigan to visit Jed’s dad. While there, a pregnant Jacy has a medical scare and something feels very off. Being in a remote area, there aren’t many helping hands available for a pregnant woman, but thankfully (or not) Jed’s dad is a doctor, Doctor Ash. Concerned for the health of his unborn grandchild, Doctor Ash goes to great lengths to eliminate any potential risks for Jacy and the child. His motivations are questionable, especially given the history of his late wife and Jed’s birth story.

There were a few elements of this book I liked: the setting in the UP of Michigan and there was some showcasing of the strength of women and what they will go through to protect their children, themselves, and each other at times.

The rest was weird for me. 90% of the book was buildup for the last 10% and it was just too slow in my opinion. The back 10% was action packed, but I needed more of that throughout. We knew something was off, but there was no element of surprise and the ending was entirely predictable. The concept of the book wasn’t up my alley either: a delusional man doing messed up things to “protect” his unborn son and grandchild. You win some, you lose some, but this one wasn’t for me.

From the moment I first read a Megan Abbott book, I knew I would devour anything she decided to write, and BEWARE THE WOMAN is no different. This feels like a continuation of the shift Abbott took with THE TURNOUT, which was still very much her unique voice but with more focus on female sexuality not at the pivotal teen years but as adults struggling to define what womanhood is or should look like. Many times, her adult characters feel stunted by some trauma or inability to conform to societal norms, something many readers will feel in their bones. In BEWARE THE WOMAN, she leans into the question of motherhood and all the expectations trapped within the idea of bodily autonomy. The answers are at once intriguing, horrifying and absolutely timely.

One of the things I love about Meg Abbott is that her books are all vastly different. They don't follow a specific formula and run the gamut, from historical to contemporary topical. So when I got the opportunity to be an advanced reader for her latest, I jumped right in, knowing no more than the title and the author. This led to a deep mystery of who the titular woman might be. The apparent choice early on is Mrs. Brant, a mysterious caretaker that brings to mind Rebecca's Mrs. Danvers, forever lurking in the shadows. There is also recurrent mention of a dangerous female predator slinking around the property. Could it be Jacy's mom or even Jacy herself? Will Jacy prove to be an unreliable narrator? I honestly had no clue where the story was going for about 3/4 of the book. When it rapidly turned, it was a surprise, but not necessarily a good one. Although I enjoyed the journey, I ultimately felt dissatisfied with the story overall. It did not have the nuance of Abbott's earlier books and the motivations of the antagonists were incredibly vague. The heavy symbolism grew tiresome, especially from a first-person narrative. I see what Abbott was trying to do here tying in the story to recent current events, but it didn't really work for me. Recommend only for the most dedicated of Abbott fans, she has so many superior stories to explore.

Note: I wanted to give this book an additional star for never once using the term "baby bump"

I received an ARC of this novel through NetGalley.

This book was quite disappointing. It is the 4th book by Megan Abbott that I've read. One of them, You Will Know Me, was a 5-star book. But the others did not measure up to that one and neither does Beware the Woman.

This book is very strange and unusual. It is about a young married couple (she is pregnant with their first child) who go to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan to visit his father for the first time. The whole book is about the ten days of weirdness that this visit becomes. It turns out that the couple has withheld secrets from each other. The father, a retired doctor, grabs control of his daughter-in-law's life when she has some complications with the pregnancy. The husband goes out and gets drunk a couple times. And lots of mystery surrounds the circumstances that led to the death of the husband's mother when the husband was born. The activities in these ten days were seemingly random. The characters were acting irrationally. To me, the reader, nothing about this scene was realistic or relatable, in sharp contrast to what I loved about You Will Know Me.

I hoped and expected that all the crazy going-on would get tied together and resolved in the end. That did not happen. The book just ended with a thud.

4 Stars out of 5 Stars. Megan Abbott is an auto-request and auto-read for me every time I see that she has a new novel. I fell in love with her writing style a few years ago and I cannot get enough of it. This novel is more horror than thriller as I usually expect from Abbott. However, I still really enjoyed it, the suspense and main mystery was compelling and kept me reading until the end. It was strange but not in a bad way for me. The novel feels a lot like a metaphor for the removal of Roe vs Wade this year and I felt that Abbott did a great job of turning that into a female-focused horror novel. I now want to read all the rest of the thrillers and cannot wait to see what she writes next.

Beware the Woman marks Abbott's departure from noir into the murkier and, often less successfully wrought, world of the modern gothic novel. I wasn't quite sure what to expect since the novel announces its genre quite earlier, but I found in the first dozen pages that Abbott is just as fine a writer of a gothic tale as a meticulously plotted thriller. The building dread was deliciously thick throughout and the pacing was strong. While there were fewer tangled webs to unweave than in, say, "The Turnout," the characters were complex, the story was rich, and I devoured it in a single sitting.

For fans of Abbott's previous works, don't fret about the slight shift in genre. Everything that makes Abbott a unique literary voice — her visceral prose, vibrant world-building, and uncanny ability to lay raw the reader while they read — is present in her latest work.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Penguin Group for providing me with an arc in exchange for an honest review.

Wow! What just happened? My heart was racing through this book. Thanks to NetGalley for the advanced copy for the purpose of this review. It was a page turner from the beginning.

I find Megan's writing to be a bit different from what I usually read but I'm here for it! I devoured this story and was rooting for the main character Jacy and her new husband Jed. I felt like there should be trigger warnings about pregnancy and loss as well. Just an FYI.

This was one of the best slow-burn thrillers I’ve read in a long time. I was low-grade creeped out right from the beginning, and I had no idea what was happening — even in the very end. I tore through the book on a cross-country flight today and have already reread the last chapter twice.

I’ll acknowledge that some readers may hate the pregnancy storyline and some of the broken storytelling patterns. That said, this was a timely look at how some people view certain women’s rights issues… for better or worse.

Now excuse me. I must google Captain Murderer.

Thank you, NetGalley and Penguin Random House, for the advance copy!

This wasn't the thriller I expected. Although well written, the pace of the. first 3/4 was excruciatingly slow. It was difficult to ascertain where the book was headed. That was compounded by the fact that most of the characters had inexplicable motivations.

I haven't read this author before, but hear good things about her books. I was disappointed by this one.

Thanks to the author, publisher and Netgalley for giving me this ARC. This is my honest review.

I read Beware the Woman in the course of a day. I began in the morning, intrigued by what was meant to be an idyllic trip for Jacy, newly married and pregnant, to visit her husband's family for the first time. I hung on to every word, as what was a seemingly normal experience of a woman attempting to relax on vacation and get to know her father-in-law--something that should be a pretty mundane, although hopefully nice experience-- felt so weirdly off-kilter from the very beginning and slowly became more and more disturbing and steeped in dread. Early into their trip, Jacy's pregnancy develops complications, and though her regular doctor assures her in a long-distance phone call that these things are a typical occurrence, the town doctor and her father-in-law (who seem suspiciously in cahoots), are treating it very differently. Jacy begins to feel trapped and housebound, she feels increasingly scrutinized and judged--not just in the present moment, but her past as well, pieces of which are being revealed without her consent, Even her husband seems to be changing in his controlling behaviors and overprotective attitudes toward her. I stayed up late into the night, on the edge of my seating, devouring the story so that I could finally learn what was driving the characters and what the mystery was, so in that sense, it was an incredibly compelling story. Once all is revealed, though, I look back and realize that I still don't know what was driving any of the characters. Not a single one. People are acting in these strange and bewildering ways and doing these concerning things, and I don't think we ever get a satisfying reason for any of it. For all that build-up, I wanted to be able to attach some reasoning to these people's actions, and that aspect of the story just wasn't there for me at all.

This felt like a different type of story than is typical from Megan Abbott. It didn't have the edge-of-my-seat thrills that I'm used to from her, but rather it had a sense of foreboding that got stronger and stronger as the story progressed. It's a creepy slow burn.

Jacy and her husband Jed are going on their first road trip as a married couple. They're going to be having a baby in a few months, and they want to visit Jed's father in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Jed hasn't been there in ages, but he wants to show off his growing family to his father, Doctor Ash. With no wi-fi or cell phone signal, the house is pretty remote. The closest person is the caretaker, Mrs. Brandt, who chastises Jacy when she brings up Jed's deceased mother. But isn't it normal for her to wonder about her husband's mother?

Why does it seem like there are so many secrets? Why does Jacy feel like everyone is talking about her? Following a health scare, Jacy is anxious to get back home to the city where she can talk to her mother and rest in her air-conditioned apartment. Except... it seems Jed's family doesn't want her to leave. Jed's father is a retired medical doctor, so surely he knows what's best. Right?

Beware the Woman is a bit of a departure for Megan Abbott. The terrible, wonderfully written characters are still there, and her masterful ability to write around solid details is also very much present, leaving readers to draw their own conclusions when it comes to character backstory and motivation. It starts out rather slow, with unwitting Jacy on a trip to visit her new father-in-law, but as with Abbott books, there is a slow twist even at the beginning that things are not going to go as planned.

This book has a bit more of a flair for horror than Abbott's previous books. Jacy is at first charmed by Doctor Ash, her husband's father. But changes lurk: her husband, Jed, starts to act more distant, less himself, more influenced in a way by his surroundings. He tells her a dark story about his father that doesn't seem to make any sense to Jacy, who sees Doctor Ash as an affable sort happy to grill and hike and show her old photos. But then the housekeeper doesn't act quite right, throwing Jacy off. When Jacy wakes up covered in blood, she's whisked away to Doctor Ash's friend's medical practice, where his friend examines Jacy and discovers she has placenta previa.

Cue the horror. From here, Jacy's body is no longer her own, but even that is a slowly tightening screw. The men huddle, determining what to do with her, while the housekeeper lurks nearby, always watching and never quite giving up what she's thinking. It starts to churn together into a story of paranoia, both medical and patriarchal. Doctor Ash and Jed just want Jacy to be safe--to think about her unborn child, to be calm and rational, to do what they say above all. Jacy wants to get the hell out, but at every turn she's threatened or scolded or had all of her means stripped away. She has no internet, no wi-fi, no reliable land line after a while. They're off in the woods, far from help. Jacy has to help herself.

This is a story of women battling back--taking revenge, taking what's theirs, owning themselves, making decisions for their own bodies when the men around them would like to be calling all the shots. It is an addictive ride, and quite a fast one when the plot starts to spin and spin, upping the tension and paranoia and slowly peeling back all of Jacy's ability to trust in other people to make the right decisions for her.

My one quibble is the housekeeper. She speaks in riddles and I was not entirely sure she needed to be so vague without explanation. There is also an extremely abrupt ending, which works for a novel that leans toward horror, and of course I can infer what happens, but I just wish these aspects of the novel had been a little cleaner.