You Were Made For This by Michelle Sacks

27th June 2018 Uncategorised

THE BLURB

Doting wife, devoted husband, cherished child. Merry, Sam and Conor are the perfect family in the perfect place. Merry adores baking, gardening, and caring for her infant son, while Sam pursues a new career in film. In their idyllic house in the Swedish woods, they can hardly believe how lucky they are. What perfect new lives they’ve built for themselves, away from New York and the events that overshadowed their happiness there.

And then Merry’s closest friend Frank comes to stay. All their lives, the two women have been more like sisters than best friends. And that’s why Frank sees things that others might miss. Treacherous things that unfold behind closed doors.

But soon it’s clear that everyone inside the house has something to hide. And as the truth begins to show through the cracks, Merry, Frank, and Sam grow all the more desperate to keep their picture-perfect lives intact.

YOU WERE MADE FOR THIS – MY THOUGHTS

I’m not sure what to say about You Were Made For This. It is a compelling read and I loved the writing style of the story. Beautifully written in the first person; dialogue is depicted in a non traditional fashion but is hypnotic in its rhythm. Written in a very biased first person viewpoint but from three seperate perspectives – a misogynistic husband, a disturbed wife and her manipulative ‘best friend’ – it provides a somewhat reliable account of what happened.

You Were Made For This is a voyeuristic view into relationships and how toxic they can be. Some people are truly nothing like they seem. The problem for me though are the characters. There is no doubt that Sacks is a stunning writer. The atmosphere that she creates is intense and the twisted relationships she descibes are a tangible entity in it’s pages. Unfortunately – not matter how compelling her writing is – it doesn’t make up for the fact that I despised Sam, Merry and Frank in equal measure.

I found You Were Made For This difficult to read at times and the story not what I expected from the synopsis. I thought I was picking up a routine physcological thriller, but what I got was so much more than that. What I did not expect though was so much of the tale to revolve around Conor ‘the infant son’ and found many of the scenes very difficult to read. This book brought me to tears on more than one occasion and I have the feeling it will stay with me for a few years to come.

I can’t say that I enjoyed You Were Made For This as I found it too upsetting and I’ll be honest and say that I am unsure what I learnt or took away from reading it. However, I will say that it’s wonderfully written in a style I enjoyed, and is an utterly compelling read. Dark and disturbing, is shows people at their very worse. An awful yet addictive look at how destructive and toxic relationships can be and how we sometimes enable them.

You Were Made For This will be released on 28 June and is currently available on Amazon for pre-order.

DISCLOSURE: many thanks to the author and publisher for granting me an eARC of this title via NetGalley in exchange for my honest review.