An Anonymous Girl

An Anonymous Girl
By: Greer Hendricks, Sarah Pekkanen

This book is suspenseful in a very slow way. I found the premise intriguing- participating in a psychological experiment of sorts that becomes a little twisted and reality is blurred from the manipulation.

In actuality, I wouldn’t put much emphasis on the blurred reality part of the advertised summary- not really the plot. There’s times Jessica wonders if an everyday encounter is part of the experiment but it’s not really a ‘is she losing her mind’ kind of manipulation.

Jessica enters a psychology study to earn more money for her family and the conductor of the study, Dr. Shields (no relation to me), takes a special interest in Jessica and asks more and more of her in future parts of the study. So there’s this mystery of why Dr. Shields is doing this study, why such an interest in Jessica, what happened to Subject 5, and can Dr. Shields’ spouse be trusted? To be honest, I was expecting darker answers to those questions than what turned out to be the case. I found the ending a little anti-climactic. I thought there would be a little more pulse-pounding action instead of neatly wrapping everything up with a bow.

But I would still recommend this book. It was still engaging and as a psych minor, I enjoyed the psychology intertwined within, a lot of the referenced psych studies I remember from my classes.

As long as you don’t go into it expecting a lot of intense action and suspense I think you’ll really like the story and seeing how things unfold. And it’s kinda a freaky scenario to think about. The implications of something like this happening, of a therapist having such personal information and manipulating clients and having the capability to affect and influence their life is definitely worth exploring in a psychological thriller like this.

One writing style thing to mention: the chapters alternate POVs. It’s either told from Jessica’s point of view (3rd person) where we can hear her thoughts or from Dr. Shields’ (first person). But with Dr. Shields’ chapters it’s almost in letter or diary form directly addressing Jessica- which I didn’t really like. It definitely makes it more creepy I suppose, but some of the vocabulary or descriptions seemed unnatural for that type of writing.

All in all- good book, will probably read others written by these authors.