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Follow Me Back by A.V. Geiger
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

I went into this book not knowing anything, and what I got out of it was a dark disturbing example of catcalling and bad rep of mental illness. We follow Tessa, an agoraphobic who had an extremely traumatic experience and it consistently going to therapy to try to get help. She has an obsessions with Eric Thorn, a celebrity singer, who seems very unhappy with where his life is at.

This story is told in multi-media format like police transcripts, direct messages, and tweets, which made it a bit easier to consume for me at least. From page one, we know something very bad happens, and we spend the rest of the book trying to connect the puzzle pieces on what happened.

What I didn't want this to be, is what it did end up being: a YA contemporary romance, but with a sinister twist. I actually wasn't a fan of the romance at all, the power unbalance and behavior from the love interest made me feel really uncomfortable. So I didn't feel like I could get behind that part of the book, which quite frankly made up the majority of the book, therefore that was lots of yawning and skimming involved.

As others have pointed out, whilst reading this I felt like the writing was mainly fan-fiction and I learnt it was previous published on Wattpad, and generally I wish it would just go through more rounds of edits. One of my main characters, Eric was a self-absorbed narcissistic dick and because I absolutely hated his character and couldn't connect with him or his choices, it really did put me off from the story itself. Meaning if the characters are extremely unlikable and illogical, and there is no redemption or reliability, it's one thing that just ruins it for me.

Onto the mental health bad rep, well we know that the main character has had severe agoraphobia for the past year of the her life. We're aware that she hasn't left her room/house for that time, and than when it becomes convenient to the plot development, she leaves with ease and says that she's "over it." Which makes so sense because that means the author didn't do enough research into how recovery works and how many baby steps people take to get to a certain point in their journey.

Not all of it is horrible, because one thing that it does have going for itself is the addictive quality. For the first one to two hundred pages, it was one of those unputdownable books. Until of course we hit the roadblock of the romance getting too much into the way and the book having bad rep and getting messy. I am not a fan of the ending, at first I didn't really know what to think of it, but I can now definitively say that I'm not a fan of it.

**Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with an ARC in exchange for my honest review. All opinions are my own.**

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