The Perfect Girlfriend by Karen HamiltonMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
Juliette loves Nate.
She will follow him anywhere. She's even become a flight
attendant for his airline, so she can keep a closer eye on him.
They are meant to be.
The fact that Nate broke up with her six months ago means nothing.
Because Juliette has a plan to win him back.
She is the perfect girlfriend.
And she'll make sure no one stops her from
getting exactly what she wants.
True love hurts, but Juliette knows it's worth all the pain...
I enjoyed this one immensely. The Perfect Girlfriend is a mixed up psychological thriller where the main protagonist Elizabeth/Lily/Juliette is quite bonkers bordering bunny boiler yet is quite simply ingenious as a main character.
So many events in her early life become intertwined and form the catalyst that unleashes the obsessive qualities in her that lead to manipulative and breathtakingly surreal life that she invents for herself and those caught up in her vision of her perfect life.
In many respects it reminded me of the film, Catch Me If You Can where the main character takes on several 'lives' and identities. Juliette is obsessive, manipulative, scary and somewhat likeable, she is driven to get what she wants and her tenacity is admirable. In the beginning I really felt for poor Nate, the object of her obsession but once you understand a little more and the story unfolds I found I felt quite sorry for Juliette and could see how she had managed to justify her actions in her own mind. She is completely fixated on having Nate and once she has made this decision, for her, there is no turning back, she will go to any lengths to get him.
It's interesting that the author decided to make the main character have two names s Elizabeth (Lily) aka Juliette seems to need to separate her life into distinctive halves and her personality mimics this perfectly. She was perfectly relatable to those she interacted with either when she was using them to get what she wanted or when she was justifying to herself her actions which made it all the more plausible. Who hasn't been wronged at sometime and fantasised about an alternative outcome, albeit we don't actually try to do something about it as she did
She was meticulous in her planning and because of the 'woman scorned' aspect of this book part of me wanted her to succeed even though she was a terrifyingly unpredictable stalker.
An addictive page turner it took very little time to consume this clever book and the somewhat open ended finish could, I hope, lead to another follow up book. Five stars from me and fingers crossed for a sequel.
I would like to thank the publisher for sending this in exchange for an honest review.
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