A review by erintowner
Give Me Your Hand by Megan Abbott

5.0

This was a twisty turny psychological thriller with some truly surprising plot twists. I really couldn't put it down. I loved the setting of the book in a chemistry lab; either the author did her research well or she's spent a lot of time in the world of scientific research. This book seemed to posit deeper questions than the average book in this genre. Some people will take the how the author talks about 'female relationships' out of context and use her words to support the popular ideas that women can't be friends, women are socialized to be nice in society but aren't at their very cores, etc. Thinking like that is reductive and not how I interpreted the author's points. I felt the author captured some things a lot of women experience very well without being too dramatic or pitting her characters against each other in a literary catfight. If you're nervous about reading this book because of all the attention that's been focused on the female characters' relationships to each other and ohmygod what do they MEAN for ALL WOMEN, don't worry about that. I didn't experience this book that way.