Book Review | He Said/She Said

Eventually getting around to one of the books that has been on my TBR for a long time.

He Said/She Said
Erin Kelly

Don’t be left in the dark.

In the hushed aftermath of a total eclipse, Laura witnesses a brutal attack. She and her boyfriend Kit call the police, and in that moment, four lives change forever.

Fifteen years on, Laura and Kit live in fear.

And while Laura knows she was right to speak out, she also knows that you can never see the whole something is always hidden . . . something she never could have guessed.

Bookshop.org | Goodreads | The StoryGraph | Amazon

I remember when this first came out seeing this everywhere and being so excited to read it and then life got in the way and I never seemed to get to it, but I am trying to make my way through my TBR and decided that I’d quite like to see what all the fuss is about.

This is the kind of book that I would say you should go into not knowing too much about because otherwise it won’t have the same effect luckily I hadn’t read anything about it for a while, although it does make it a little hard to talk about. What I will say is it took me a while to get into the story, it seemed very slow at the start, almost a little bit like like it was a chore to go back to, but thinking of the hype that it had I decided to stick with it.

It turns out it is quite slow to start, but it is setting up this very uncomfortable atmosphere that slowly gets under your skin and kind of set me on edge for a lot of the book. All so that when the pace starts to pick up and certain machinations come to light I was absolutely hooked and couldn’t wait to find a minute to pick it up again.

I went through a stage where I was regularly reading this kind of thriller and I often felt like I could see “the big twist” coming a mile away or that it didn’t quite pay off in the way I expected. With He Said/She Said there are so many layers to what happens that everything felt like a surprise and the twists for me were unexpected.

The eclipse chasing was such an interesting backdrop to this story, and I liked that it helped shape the timeline for the book. This is told from the perspective of Kit and Laura and jumps between past and present, which helped in building that uncomfortable suspense and certainly made me want to get through one more chapter as they often ended on a dramatic moment only to jump to another time or POV.

I’m glad I finally picked up this book and can understand why it got the hype that it did when it was first released. I will definitely be looking out for more books by Erin Kelly in the future.