Oh Joe… what are we doing to do with you? You are our favorite serial killer and even though we know what you do is wrong we keep asking for more Joe.. does Joe get love right for once? Does he get the love he thinks he deserves?! Oh Joe.

Joe Goldberg’s continuing story was good, but not what I expected. Joe is now at Harvard, where he becomes part of an aspiring writers group. It’s there that he meets Wonder, his newest obsession. This book did not pull me in as much as the previous books did, but I do enjoy getting to see what happens next in this series. 3/5 stars. Thank you NetGalley for the ARC!

Caroline Kepnes knows just how to thrill and disgust you at the same time with a character that’s a paradox. You can’t help but follow him along even as he spirals down a dark path. Absolutely enthralling!

Another creepy, thrilling, and satirical installment of the YOU series. Joe is the serial killer we all hate-love to read about. If you are a fan of this series, you will enjoy this next installment, I highly recommend it!

I really enjoyed and loved the first book in this “You” series. Book two was amazing too. The third was good, but not as good as the first two books.

This one left me hanging. I didn’t like the writing as much. It starts out at Harvard and a tight-nit writing group and then Joe meets his next love interest and starts rambling. In his mind. A very repetitive action and he lost me a few times.

In the end, I think this is it for me and Joe Goldberg. I’d like to remember him from the first two books, when he made me giddy with excitement to read more.

I received a complimentary copy of this book. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own.

Another creepy, thrilling, and satirical installment of the YOU series. Joe is the serial killer we all hate-love to read about. If you are a fan of this series, you will enjoy this next installment, I highly recommend it! I will keep reading Joe as long as Caroline Kepnes continues to write him!

This is my guilty pleasure series. I just love living in the world of Joe Goldberg so much, though this one fell a little flat for me.

Oh Joe. It's amazing how I continue to love you despite it all. While the vibe of this one felt slightly different than books 1-3, I didn't dislike it. I love seeing what Joe is up to and what trouble he'll find his way to. I will always read a Joe book.

Oh noooo I didn’t like this one :( It just didn’t feel as cohesive as previous books in this series and that makes me soo sad because I LOVE this series.
There were so many jumping time lines/plots that I kept getting lost. One second we’re on campus and the next we are in Sarah Beth’s dead shed without a proper transition. Maybe that was supposed to be written to jolt you into the next scene but I wasn’t a fan and kept getting whiplash.
Joe wasn’t so focused on his obsession of being in LOVE with the girl, but more of his obsession of hate and it just didn’t hit the spot like past novels.

I feel weird saying I enjoy being in Joe Goldberg’s mind, but we all know how compelling he is as a character. However, I think this whole series has run its course. “You” remains a 5 star but it’s slowly gone downhill since then.

Caroline Kepnes’s For You and Only You is an electrifying read that had me hooked from the first page. Her knack for crafting psychologically complex characters really shines here, especially in the way she delves into the protagonist’s twisted mind. The suspense is palpable, and Kepnes’s sharp, witty writing kept me on edge, constantly guessing what would happen next. I loved the intricate plot twists and the way she explores themes of obsession and control—it's both unsettling and fascinating. If you’re into dark thrillers with rich character development, this book is a must-read. It’s an intense, thrilling ride that’s hard to put down.

Thank you to Netgalley for this advance PDF. One cannot blame Caroline Kepnes for striking while the iron is hot with her series of books about Joe Goldberg. While the 2nd book, Hidden Bodies, ended in such a way that you wonder if she might have been ready to move on from Joe, the popularity of the TV adaptation of You (on Netflix since its 2nd season) and the cooler reception to her novel Providence (which I really liked) probably made her reconsider. The books and the show share a strange territory with Jeff Lindsay’s Dexter series, where the first season is a mostly faithful recreation of the first book, and then it completely goes off in its own direction without truly adapting the subsequent novels. Season 2 of You shares little in common with Hidden Bodies outside of “Joe goes to the west coast,” with similarly little parallel between season 3 and You Love Me. I haven’t found it difficult to enjoy each for what they do, at least until season 4 of You, where diminishing returns were glaringly obvious. I was relieved there would be another book from Kepnes to redeem the disappointment from the show and an especially ill-conceived mid season twist it could never recover from.

That said, the books are also bringing diminishing returns in their latest installments, if not on the level of the series, and For You and Only You is the least of them. However, it does at least remain more enjoyable than its counterpart, as Joe’s singular and sarcastic consciousness informs the plot machinations. Like the show, Joe is at a university, having already departed the bar he ran at the end of the last book, but he is at Harvard rather than Oxford, and rather than teaching literature, he is writing it in a fellowship with more established or privileged writers, save for his new obsession, Wonder. Joe sets about ingratiating himself with group guru Glenn Shoddy to further his and Wonder’s chances of literary success, but Glenn isn’t who he presents himself and Joe doesn’t have the smoothest start with Wonder, either.

The book more successfully navigates the literature backdrop, which is much more incidental to season 4 of the show. The relationships, expectations, and delusions among the group guide the narrative. This does have the consequence of so many of the interactions between characters becoming exchanges of psychoanalysis, though. An author writing about the process of writing isn’t such a “novel” idea and potentially alienating for those who just want a good story, rather than the inside baseball of what might go into that. It does provide Kepnes a passage of reader comments berating a character to get back to the murders of her mystery/thriller brand when she strays into romance territory, which one can’t help wondering might be a thinly veiled re-creation of the reception to Providence.

One of the best moments is unrelated to the doings of the group, when Joe attempts to deal with a rival to Wonder’s affections, and the subsequent punchline to his effort. Speaking of Wonder, though, Joe’s immediate attraction to her isn’t as easy to ride with as past books. Maybe I’d find the same sort of hesitance with RIP Beck in book one, looking back, but there seem to be several warning signs that he shouldn’t bother trying with Wonder. It’s harder to get invested in his effort, sensing how misplaced it is. Some of the references to prior events didn't ring a bell for me, and it's not always easy to glean from context what happened, so maybe consider reading a summary of the past books. Introducing the writer group upfront rather than staggering them a little also makes it a challenge to remember who is who, even with Joe’s steadfast mocking of their personalities. His expected exasperation and condemnation of people and situations remain witty, though, which is perhaps one area where the series maintains its quality—the books are always funny, though my memory is that Hidden Bodies and its Hollywood satire probably did it best. The plot is also less fluid than some of the other outings, and it feels like the table is just cleared to set the next course without concerns for cohesion. It is at least never a chore to keep the pages turning, and I found I’d read through about 2/3 of it without realizing the extent of my progress or being that concerned about it.

Ultimately, For You and Only You has more apparent flaws than its predecessors but remains an entertaining read that shows Joe isn’t wearing out his welcome on both the literary and TV fronts. I’ll be much more eager for book 5 than season 5, with the hope that each is an improvement on the last.

3⭐️

I love a bad guy I can root for. I’ve been a fan of Joe since book one but at this point, they are starting to get a little repetitive. I miss the Joe of the first book. I didn’t enjoy this one as much as I’ve enjoyed the previous ones. It fell a bit flat for me.

I will probably still read the next one, if there is another one, because I really have enjoyed the series overall.

Thank you to NetGalley for a copy of this eARC in exchange for an honest review.

Caroline Kepnes has a way of keeping me on the edge of my seat, for a whole book. This series gets a lot of attention because of the show, but wow these books are so much better. Every story leaves a great opening for another, and I hope they continue to come out.

Joe Goldberg will always be my favorite serial killer (besides Dexter). His life if just out of control and his stalking is perfection (in fiction). Here we had another great installment of Joe’s life.

I love Caroline Kepnes’ writing style and she will always be an auto-buy author to me. No matter what she writes she does it in a way that I get so immersed I don’t want to leave them.

I've loved Joe Goldberg since the first "Hello, you." but I sadly found this one to be a labor of love to read. For You and Only You lacked the spark of the previous installments and I found Joe to be more tedious than anti-hero charming. Hopefully the Joe we love will be present in the next installment.

Kepnes did it again. Somehow she continually gets me to unwillingly root for an extremely disturbed serial killer. I ended up listening to the audiobook of this one, and I think the audiobooks of this series are just wonderful. I always feel like I am directly in Joe’s head through the entire story.

This book took me forever to read. I think Joe's days were long over after book 2. I almost DNF'd but pushed on through. Would not recommend.

Oh Joe! I’ve been delighted with Kepnes’ YOU series for years and finally getting to see Joe write a book of his own was a treat!

thank you so much to netgalley & the publisher for this arc!!

I love this series! the first three books I was so obsessed with and genuinely loved all of them. But I think at this point it’s time for the series to end. It should’ve ended with the third book.

It’s all become so repetitive & it all feels bland. It feels like none of the reveals or “horrors” of this book hit like they should’ve considering. It’s all just a copy and paste of the last book with a little tweaking. I hope others like this more than me but for real it’s time to finish the series.

Joe Goldberg is an enticing yet uncomfortable anti-hero to root for. For three books, it's been thrilling to follow his trajectory, city to city, victim to victim. Unfortunately, what made the former novels exciting - namely, stakes and interesting side characters - is missing from <i>For You and Only You</i>. It's an interesting premise: Joe amongst the literary crowd at Harvard; however, the interest stops there. it was hard to parse whether the other characters we meet seemed bland because of Joe's overinflated sense of self or because they were poorly written. Whatever the case, the story plodded and the characters bored me, which made finishing the book a chore instead of the fast-paced page-turner I've come to expect from Kepnes. Disappointing all around.