Thursday, April 20, 2017

The Perfect Stranger by Megan Miranda

The Perfect Stranger by Megan Miranda was one of those books that left me wondering if you can ever really truly know someone.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/31443398-the-perfect-stranger

Leah Stevens has lost everything. She's lost her job and her credibility, but she found the one person she never thought she'd see again; her former roommate Emmy Grey. The women relocate to a small town where no one knows them and they try to begin again. Leah soon lands a job as a high school teacher. A woman who looks like Leah turns up dead and Emmy has gone missing. No one can find Emmy, but Leah is becoming convinced that she is somehow connected to the murder. Since no one knows the women, people begin to suspect that there never really was an Emmy and that Leah knows more than she's letting on.

This book really hooked me and kept me guessing. It played games with my mind and left me wondering if there was actually an Emmy Grey. Leah is an unreliable protagonist, which definitely added to the mystery. I wasn't sure what to think about Leah. I found it hard to be sympathetic towards her, even though she really didn't deserve the things that happened to her. She was very frustrating at times because she seemed very selfish. How do you live with someone twice and know absolutely nothing about them?

With Emmy missing, Leah is faced with confronting her past, especially as someone in town seems to be digging it up. Leah suspects one of her students, Theo, is messing with her but isn't sure why. This particular storyline kind of creeped me out because it made me realize how easy it is for people to dig up information about us online these days. Theo had no trouble looking into Leah's past with a simple Internet search, which is kind of disturbing if you stop and think about it. What are we putting out there? Mind you, Leah was a journalist so it'd be easy to find her stories, but it kind of reiterates that the Internet is forever and to be careful with what you put out there.

The book has lots of little details and things that really make the story come full circle. I loved not knowing whether or not Emmy was real. I spent most of the book thinking that Leah was also Emmy. I won't tell you whether or not I was right, because where's the fun in that? I ended up giving this book a 3.5 out of 5 because I enjoyed the mystery and it left me wanting to know more.

Megan Miranda is the author of the bestselling All the Missing Girls, which I haven't read, but which has been added to my TBR for sure! The Perfect Stranger is on sale now and is the perfect book to curl up with on these spring nights that are still chilly.

A copy of this book was provided by Simon and Schuster Canada, but as always, opinions are my own.

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