Last week, I gave You by Caroline Kepnes five stars, which is relatively rare for me, though I gave The Secret Woman by Victoria Holt five stars yesterday, so maybe a trend is starting, who knows. You was simply a perfect book, told in present tense, first person, linearly, with no POV mistakes. Even though the protagonist was a very bad man, his behavior was "understandable" when we were living inside his head. Plus, he wanted so badly to be loved and to be a good person, but... things just got away from him. Obviously, he could have just shrugged at his losses, or written volumes of angsty poetry like most of us non-murderers do, but that wouldn't have been an interesting story. When I finished the book, I realized it was book one of four, but I hesitated in paying full price for the next one. I read 5-10 books per month, so I have to be careful (in fact, I am renewing my HB library card today so I can borrow more Victoria Holt books ~ I am regressing to age 14 when I gobbled these up weekly, and luckily I have forgotten 99%, so I can enjoy the books anew.). Also, I suspected that You books two through four couldn't possibly be as good as book one.
SPOILER ALERT FOR THE BOOK AND THE SHOW!
I think I was right, given the Netflix series. I totally applaud the casting of Penn Badgley as Joe Goldberg ~ he is handsome but not swoony, and while he usually presents as "normal" even when crazy thoughts are swarming through his brain via the narrative, on a dime he can switch to wild-eyed maniac. Excellent acting. The rest of the cast is great as well, though in the book, Peach isn't supposed to be gorgeous. One of the issues I have with the series is that it wrecks the book's POV perfection; instead of sticking strictly with Joe's perspective, the show sometimes pans out to a sort of omniscient narration to give us Beck sans Joe. I don't want/need to know what Beck is thinking/feeling/doing outside of the narrow scope of Joe's perceptions. That's literally the beauty of the book, and the show does not improve upon that by going outside of Joe's head.
One of the other issues I have with the show's first season is their attempt to make Joe a better person by having him help a little neighbor boy. At first, I thought cool, cool, this adds a depth to his character we didn't see in the book, but eventually the boy's story took on a life of its own, and I was like meh, who cares. This is Joe's story, and we don't need any distractions. I also didn't like that Beck's tragic ending hinged upon the boy refusing to unlock the door for her; again, this took away from Joe's agency. We know that Joe will kill Beck eventually when she fails to love him as he believes he deserves; thus, as in the book, he should bear total responsibility for the entire orchestration of her murder. Even so, I still pretty much enjoyed S1, until the very end when Candace "returned" from the dead. Ugh. Why couldn't she stay dead and Joe's fixation on a new woman become the sole impetus for further shenanigans? There was no good reason to diverge from the book in this way, and this plotline becomes even more strained in S2.
Let's talk about season two of You. I hate it. Now, since I didn't read the second book (Hidden Bodies), I don't know how much the show diverges from it, but we do know that Candace stays dead in the book, so already we have the absurdity of her showing up in California to become the girlfriend of the brother of Joe's new love (who is named Love) and harass Joe. Speaking of Joe's skedaddle to the Golden State, I am sure that in the book it is explained how he comes up with the cash to make this move, rent a nice apartment, etc., but that's completely glossed over in the show, which is typical for TV/movies, as those writers have no clue about real-world money. Joe steals the identity of the criminal he finds to sell him a false identity, which is clever, but suddenly Joe builds a plexiglass cage inside a storage locker to imprison this guy, which is also unbelievable. As annoying as Candace and the cage are, however, these two factors alone are not what completely turned me off from the show.
The first thing that turned me off was when I realized that Love didn't simply appear in Joe's life a la Beck but that he stalked Love and planned his life around her by getting a job where she worked. Now, that is typical Joe behavior, but in the first episode it seemed like he was trying to avoid a repeat of what happened with Beck and intended to live a simple life devoid of romantic entanglements. Nope. He pursued Love to his usual nth degree, then pulled back for a while. I don't know why, but this bothered me a lot, not that I was ever actually sympathetic with Joe's horrible behavior, but it seemed sort of understandable from his perspective ~ that things just happened to him he had no control over, not that he deliberately caused them to happen.
The second thing that turned me off was Joe's concern for his landlord's annoying teenaged sister. Not only was it creepy, given Joe's predatory nature, but again I felt it was just tossed into the mix to give Joe more of a well-rounded character rather than being true to Joe's actual character. Think about it. Joe escapes from New York and all the Beck fallout to start fresh in the West. We know that he can't help getting caught up in a new romantic drama, since the essence of Joe is one dark pit of yearning for the mythical perfect woman, but putting his whole new life at risk to become involved with this teenaged girl is simply not believable. Joe is a methodical, careful man. He is a plotter and a planner. He does not do impulsive, reckless things to put himself in jeopardy.
Finally, while I didn't mind Joe's continual snarking at the Ivy League folks in New York who never cracked open a book, since (imo) that was specifically earned and deserved, his continual mockery of California stereotypes grated on my nerves. Yes, Californians are all into yoga and bullshit diets/cleanses. Sure. Eyeroll. If it irritates you so much, why did you deliberately surround yourself with it? Why move to the LA area instead of further east in CA, which is not only cheaper but also less stereotypical? I felt that the TV writers diminished Joe's intellect by doing this (again, I didn't read book two, so idk if Ms. Kepnes wrote him the same way there). In New York, Joe definitely seemed like a savvy, self-taught guy who could outsmart highly educated people, but in California he seemed like a stereotype himself ~ the former East Coaster who thinks he's better than everyone in the West. I mean, my god, they don't even know how to make bagels out here, the horror. And don't even talk to me about the pizza...
My interest in You completely fizzled about halfway through S2, and now I'm done.
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