Not nearly as bad as The Perfect Marriage but still an incredibly lackluster for a thriller. I never felt like there were any stakes because I knew going in that all of the narrators would be unreliable. Sarah and Bob spent the entire book lying to the audience in their narration, so I just assumed that none of the stakes were actually real (which was true).

Even though The Perfect Divorce has better writing, more realistic dialogue, and more consistent characterization than The Perfect Marriage, I cannot in good conscience give it a better rating because of the final "twist" of the book. At the end of the book we find out that

Sarah had masterminded the entire plot and was an unreliable first-person narrator (lazy writing) which was THE SAME EXACT TWIST AS THE PERFECT MARRIAGE. Jeneva Rose just reused the same twist in the sequel

. I read The Perfect Marriage and The Perfect Divorce back-to-back and I felt like I was losing my mind when

I finished the second book and it was the same twist as the first book

. It truly blows my mind how low-effort Jeneva Rose's thrillers are. When she isn't copying other authors' plot twists (cough, cough, Gone Girl, cough, cough) she is copying her already published works. 

Does Adam deserve the death penalty for murder? No. Does Adam deserve the death penalty for being a brain-dead idiot who spends 200+ pages making stupid mistake after stupid mistake? Yes. 

 

Adam and Sarah are both wildly inconsistent in their motivations from chapter-to-chapter. In one chapter Sarah doesn’t want to find the identity of the third DNA because she thinks that it will help her case, but three chapters later she is tracking down the DNA herself. In one chapter Adam believes that Scott is the killer, but three chapters later he is completely convinced that it is someone from Kelly’s past. 

 

The characters are all cartoonishly over-the-top in everything they say and do. Adam’s relationship with his mother, Eleanor, is the perfect example of this. Eleanor just exists to be a caricature of a horrible Mother-in-law. Adam was a self-centered insufferable manchild who only ever thought about himself. He has a victim complex a mile wide despite the fact that the affair was his fault. Adam never takes any responsibility for his mistakes to the point that by the 75% mark, I was rooting for him to get the death penalty. 

 

Despite the fact that these characters are supposed to be rational functioning adults with careers and working frontal lobes, none of these characters acted like professionals (or even like real people). The dialogue was juvenile and filled with snarky comments and sarcastic quips (AKA how no one actually talks in real life). The amount of random out-of-place physical violence/violent daydreams really broke my suspension of disbelief. In all of her books I've read so far, Jeneva Rose has written the same two POV characters in all of her books: the stick-up-her-ass girlboss FMC and the entitled manchild MMC. Clearly, the formula is not working.

 

Overall, this book is the perfect storm of my least favorite thriller plot devices.

The wife getting revenge on her cheating husband trope is SO overdone, so it was kind of a letdown that this was the big twist. Comparing The Perfect Marriage to Gone Girl is like comparing a middle school play to a broadway performance. Gone Girl did this trope so well that everything else pales in comparison. Additionally, this book contains my least favorite thriller plot device: when one of the POV characters hides their own thoughts from themselves in order for the final plot twist to work. After reading 100+ pages from Sarah’s first-person POV, it is entirely unrealistic Sarah’s internal monologue to contain no evidence of her involvement in the crime.

 

It is unfortunate, because somewhere buried in the terrible writing, inconsistent characterization, and inane plot twists, the premise of this book was actually very interesting. 

Started medical school and didn’t have the time

The same engaging plotline of a Criminal Minds episode but without the endearing characters.

For an FBI serial killer cat-and-mouse-type crime thriller, this book executed its plot well. The story was interesting and well-paced. The pacing was fast enough that I wasn't bothered when new clues came somewhat out of left field.

However, I was not particularly invested in the characters. When it came to Gardner and his relationships with others, I felt like we were being told a lot about his personality that we weren't shown. We are told early on that there is something different about Gardner, but even though the book is from his perspective, I never really got the sense that he had a difficult time interacting with others except for when he very explicitly told the audience this in his narration: telling the audience, but not showing the audience.

Falls more into the category of literary fiction than mystery/thriller, but it was suspenseful enough to keep me engaged. 

There are four main POVs in this book (Valerie's journal, Lt. Bev, Lena, Cody's interview with Ruben). While each POV holds up on its own, with its own character conflict and development, I found myself wishing at the end of the book that the POVs intertwined a bit more. 

I most enjoyed Lena's plotline, which contained the least amount of plot but the greatest emotional weight. This one quote stuck with me:

The writing style was very engaging and the atmosphere of this book was so vivid — I felt very immersed in the Adirondack summer camp setting. The tidbits of the history of the Van Laar family and how they came to live at Self-Reliance was really interesting. 

The multitude of POVs and subplots kept the momentum of the story going, but when it came to the subplots, there were definitely some characters that I was more interested in than others. I liked the overall ending:

that Bear's disappearance was a cover-up done by the family after Alice accidentally put him in danger

, and

that Barbara disappeared by choice (with help from T.J.) due to the neglect from her family

, and I liked that the two disappearances were

mostly unrelated from each other

. My favorite POVs were Tracy's and Alice's. I liked where Tracy's storyline ended but I wish we had gotten one final POV from Alice after everything was uncovered. 

Overall, I think that while the plot as a mystery/thriller is good (but not excellent), the writing makes this a fantastic literary fiction novel.

✨ currently my favorite read of 2025 ✨

The protagonist, Jane, and her character arc is hands-down the best part of this book. The groundwork done in establishing Jane as a character is incredible. The depiction of her grief after losing her father was so raw and powerful. Even when I hated the choices that her character made, all of her choices made sense because they were all so obviously informed by her grief. Jane's journey in understanding the life and death of her father and its parallel into her journey into true crime grounds the plot (which I think would have felt exploitative without being tied to Jane's father) in real emotion. The themes of grief, guilt, blame, and legacy were explored in really nuanced ways because of this parallel between the benign personal tragedy and the spectacle of true crime-tragedy.

This book does exceptional work with the found family trope,

which makes it so devastating when Citizen betrays the rest of the group

. The reveal of

Citizen as the second murderer and Elizabeth as the first murder

is a bit anti-climactic, but I didn't care because I was so deeply invested in the characters.

I think that the main criticisms of this book will be how much inspiration it takes from the 2022 University of Idaho Massacre (which I admit got a bit flagrant in some places). The book poses the question of whether true crime sleuthing is ethical but we never really get any resolution to this question (although I think leaving that question unanswered is in itself an answer). Lastly, I think that readers will criticize that the twist of

Citizen being one of the killers

was obvious (which I agree that the twist was obvious, but I disagree that it makes the book worse for being obvious).

A quote that I feel sums up the experience of this book:

Further proof that an obsession with Lana del Rey will ruin your life.

Truly a tantalizing read! The writing is smooth and descriptive. The characters are sharp and raw. The plot balances between shocking extravagance and meandering exploration, and it always has a point to make. The themes of beauty, youth, intimacy, and guilt are explored in a way that felt very honest to me. Agnes isn't a perfect character, but she feels so real to me, with all of her self-centeredness and self-consciousness and human flaws. 

To me, this book fall perfectly into the sub-genre of literary fiction that I adore. It is a coming-of-age novel with a razor-sharp focus and a taste for luxury.

Short and fast-paced with an interesting twist but a lot of overdone tropes. Maybe it's because I just recently read The Tenant, but the cheating husband and the scorned-woman murderess protagonist felt overused and lacking in originality. Still, I have to give Frieda some kudos for her restraint in making this a novella and not a full-length novel.

Incredibly tense and anxiety-inducing thriller! The storytelling was very dynamic and engaging, with frequent POV changes that really helped to elevate the tension in the story (and I'm someone who isn't typically a fan of multi-POV stories). The fast-paced plot kept me hooked through the entire story! My only negative is that there weren't really any twists that surprised me — there wasn't anything that I didn't pretty much immediately pick up on.

All of the POV characters felt very unique and realistic. Even Sage, the child character, felt like a realistically written twelve-year-old girl. I liked the character development that all of our POV characters went through.

I really enjoyed the ending. I definitely teared up when

Sage was reunited with her Grandfather at the memory care facility

!