Oh Sara Shepard.

It's like she writes YA or something. This would have been better as YA. ( )

Thoroughly okay. Some exciting moments with good revelations, but the connective tissue is lack luster and the suspense to each revelation is not too gripping. If you've previously liked Sara Shepard, give it a go. ( )

Eliza, a brain tumor survivor, wrote a novel in just a few days after coming home from the hospital. It is now about to be published, when she wakes up in a Palm Springs hospital. Her family tells her she was pulled from the bottom of a hotel pool, drunk, by a passerby. She cannot swim, and jumping into pools was the main symptom of her brain tumor.

As her book approaches pub day, and as strange things continue to happen, she begins to truly question her sanity, and even goes for an MRI just to know for sure that her tumor is back.

And then she discovers that nothing is as she thinks it is.
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This book was fine. It's somewhere between a mystery and a thriller. I found the first half a little jarring, as the story went back and forth between this novel and Eliza's novel (The Dots--a painfully cutesy yet such a believable title it made me laugh). So, a novel within a novel. Maybe on paper it would not have been quite so jarring, but on audio I kept forgetting what novel I was listening to until a character's name came up or Dorothy began speaking. Jayme Mattler narrates, and her Dorothy voice was distinctive.

Will I remember this in a year? Probably not, but it was a nice palate cleanser. ( )

A couple of years ago, I got the four-book Pretty Little Liars collections as a library ebook. I started reading it on the G train from the studio, and I read it all freaking night. I could not stop until I knew all the secrets. (The show is fine, but it didn't suck me in the way the books did.)

The Elizas, Sara Shepard's newest book, was also a one-day read for me. The story begins with novelist Eliza Fontaine waking up in the hospital after almost drowning in a hotel pool. She's sure she was pushed, but doesn't know who tried to kill her, or why. Eliza, though, has a history of attempting suicide by drowning, and some memory issues after her brain surgery, and maybe a little problem with alcohol, so she has trouble convincing anyone.

There are a lot of really ominous moments, where it seems like something's going on just out of Eliza's vision. For example, there's a police detective (or is he???) who shrugs off her suspicions of attempted murder by telling her she seems like a nice girl, based on the five minutes he's seen her, so she probably doesn't have any enemies. Gabby, Eliza's strangely passive step-sister, is either way too nice or just biding her time to take revenge on the sister who harassed her for years. And the guy who fished Eliza out of the pool is one odd duck, for way too many reasons.

Eliza's story is told in alternating chapters with chapters from her novel, The Dots. At first, they two stories seem to be thematically similar, but then there are some uncanny similarities between Eliza's life and the book that she believes is fiction. The novel shifts between two mysteries and the realization that the solution to both mysteries is connected.

I've got a spoiler-riffic fan theory on exactly what the last scene meant, but save it until you've read the novel. http://www.thefictionaddiction.com/fan-theory-10/
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3.5/5 ( )