If I could give you just one piece of advice, it would be to avoid this book like the plague. It is, hands down, the worst book I have ever had the misfortune to read. Not only is it dull and completely uninteresting…it is terribly written. Seriously, terrible.
If you want to know the faults in the plot, just go read over the above summary of the book. Don’t worry, I’ll wait….
So the plot summary seems kind of mysterious. Maybe even sinister. At least that’s the impression that I got when I entered the contest to receive a free copy of this book.I expected a mystery or thriller…sometime a little different than my usual reading fare to shake things up a bit. After I finished though, I realized that I could have saved the publishing company money as the entire story is already told in the plot summary…a few minor things did pop up in the book that wasn’t alluded to in the summary but nothing that kept my interest or made reading this book worthwhile.
The dialogue was completely horrendous. I did not read a single conversation in this book that did not make me want to roll my eyes. Not one piece of dialogue was natural. It did give me a few good laughs though…not because it was purposely funny of course…but because of how god awful it sounded.
If it was just these issues, I probably would have given this book a two stars. It wasn’t a book I enjoyed for sure…but not completely terrible…however, Susan Allison-Dean (and well, her editor if she bothered with one) committed two sins that I just cannot forgive. The first one, the one that was more annoying than anything was her overuse of the exclamation mark. Nearly every page had at least one. At first I thought maybe her ! key had gotten stuck on her keyboard or something…but then I realized just how implausible that is. I’m sure somewhere James Patterson is sitting at his desk weeping over the fact that he is no longer in the running for most exclamation points used in a single novel.
The second unforgivable sin that dropped this novel down to a firm, one star book, was Susan Allison-Dean’s completely disregard to a writer’s most important physical tool…a dictionary. In at least two instances Susan Allison-Dean uses the word infamous instead of famous. Sure, they do sound very much alike and although English rules can be hard to grasp sometimes…the two words have very different meanings…meanings that should have been sorted out back in Elementary school. Of course I could have read it wrong…perhaps the word should have been infamous. For all I know, Jill’s mother could be known for putting rat poison in her baked goods…but I highly doubt it.
I’m not going to tell you not to read I Know You’re There, that’s you’re prerogative…but please don’t come back saying I didn’t warn you.
