Woman in the Window

If you diligently monitor new book releases, you probably saw The Woman in the Window, a debut novel from A. J. Finn, came out yesterday.

If you do not diligently monitor the weekly book releases, no worries. I got an advance copy of the book and am here to tell you all about it.

The Woman in the Window

The book is told from the perspective of our main character, Dr. Anna Fox, a child psychologist. We see only what she sees, and only when she sees it. This is awkward, because she never leaves the house thanks to a her crippling agoraphobia, so everything comes to us in snippets of what she sees or how she experiences things. She’s clearly suffered a great trauma that has her terrified of leaving her home, and supplements her many medications with wine. She spends some of her time providing psychology services to people online, and the rest of her time watching the few neighbors she can see from her front windows using the zoom lens on her camera. If her neighbors care, they haven’t yet indicated their displeasure.

But then Anna sees someone murdered in the window of her neighbor’s house and panics in her attempt to get help. When the police later try to explain that perhaps she’s imagined it (hallucinations are a side effect of her heavy medications), Anna must come to grips with one of two scenarios: either she’s imagined the whole thing, is losing her damn mind, and nobody has died; or perhaps someone has died after all and the police have merely chalked it up to a crazy woman hallucinating, which means they will not be doing anything to solve it.

Anna is certain of what she saw, and is certain that the recent string of stalker-ish activity happening to her is directly related to it. But, when her whole world is the inside of her house and the many wine bottles, she must find her own path to sanity or salvation.

Have you ever seen “Rear Window”, with Jimmy Stewart and Grace Kelly? It’s an Alfred Hitchcock film, if you like those sort of things. I’ve seen it oodles of time – both because it’s an oldie and because Hitchcock made it – which is probably no surprise given my recent penchant for using “Thin Man” images. This is quite similar: a person with an impairment kills time by spying on their neighbors with a long camera lens, sees something questionable in an apartment across the courtyard, and then spends the remainder of the movie trying to convince his friend that something terrible has happened and justice should be served. 

Image result for rear window movie

This book is that movie.

As a side, this book is being developed for a movie. Which makes sense, you know, because Hollywood loves to remake movies and that’s what this will feel like. I think.

Which is fine, because I do really like that movie. Granted, Anna is female, a psychologist suffering from a mental ailment, and – usually – pretty tipsy. None of those things really describe Jimmy Stewart’s character.

And . . . if you like books that try to emulate the style of Alfred Hitchcock, where you know almost nothing is quite all right, then this book will be great.

But still.

And there is more than one twist, particularly towards the end, so that was nice.

But . . . bear with me while I try to complain as nicely as I can. It took over half a book just to learn something about Anna beyond “Anna never leaves the house”. There were some supporting characters that were, in my opinion, unnecessary, and other supporting characters that should have been explored more. The ending was . . . maybe not believable enough for me. (And, yes, I fully realize many books and movies have completely unrealistic endings.) All in all, I’m not really sure I can pinpoint one thing that I really didn’t like.

This was a book that I read initially and thought, “ooh, I liked that”. Then I let it percolate in my brain for a few days, and, the more I thought about it, the more I thought, “eh, it was okay”. It was just, to me, a little underwhelming for the genre it strove for. I think the problem was that for me it was very much a book adaptation of Alfred Hitchcock’s movie, and this book just fell a little short of the bar.

None of this might be a problem if you’ve never seen “Rear Window”. Or maybe you won’t care, which is totally fine. Unfortunately, I am asked to provide an opinion and my opinion is that this book had really good potential but just didn’t quite hit the target.

Overall: 7/10

*I received an electronic advance copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for my honest review.

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