You
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The day Guinevere Beck walks into Joe Goldberg's East Village bookstore, life for both of them will never be the same. Guinevere is a hot young thing, beautiful, creative, and tough, recently transplanted to New York City to attend graduate school. Beck is Joe's dream girl, everything he has ever wanted in a significant other. When Joe rescues her in the subway, a grateful Beck agrees to go out with him. Thus begins a relationship defined by passion, obsession, and even murder. Joe becomes the ultimate stalker. He spies on Beck through her curtainless windows and gains access to her e-mails and tweets by stealing her phone. Written in the second person, You is the story of one man's life, a life where love becomes obsession, and obsession becomes murder, experienced and perpetrated by a character who is strangely likable despite his bad behavior. Kepnes, a television writer and journalist, has written a deeply dark yet mesmerizing first novel of two people caught in a romantic tangle with an ever-tightening knot.--Gladstein, Carol Copyright 2014 Booklist

Debut novelist Kepnes's seriously unsettling depiction of stalking nevertheless manages to invoke glimmers of sympathy for its perpetrator. Joe is working as a clerk at a bookstore on New York City's Lower East Side when M.F.A. writing student Guinevere Beck (known as Beck) saunters in. Joe knows immediately that they're meant to be together. What follows is a chronicle of Joe's psychotic preoccupation with Beck, told in Joe's relentless, alternately passionate and vitriolic narration and addressed to Beck as "you." Astonishingly enough, his fixation materializes into a relationship of sorts. Joe, who is well-read but never attended college, has a chip on his shoulder about his education and class status and the assumptions people make about him. Beck, for her part, prefers to stir up dramas rather than seriously work on her writing. What's most chilling about this novel, besides its plausibility, is the way in which Kepnes makes the reader empathize with Joe during the journey into his troubled mind. Her book will have readers looking over their shoulders-and examining their own motivations. Agent: Jennifer Rudolph Walsh and Claudia Ballard, WME Entertainment. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

When Joe Goldberg meets Guinevere Beck in the East Village bookstore where he works, he instantly knows that she's the one for him. Sure, he thought the same about Candace, but Candace is no longer in his life and he's sure that Guinevere is the one. The only problem is Guinevere doesn't seem to know it yet. So Joe gives her some time. Time he spends watching her, hacking her computer, and even saving her from her mistakes. When she drunkenly falls onto the subway tracks late at night, he's there to offer her a hand. And when he realizes her boyfriend Benji is cheating on her, Joe gets Benji out of the way. In fact, Joe will do pretty much anything, including commit murder, to make sure that Guinevere becomes his. VERDICT Kepnes certainly has the creepy factor down in her debut novel, taking readers deep into Joe's thoughts and feelings, to extremely suspenseful effect. And Joe is entirely believable as the stalker from hell. Though there are no ghosts and the only thing that goes bump in the night is Joe, this will appeal to fans of psychological horror. Jane Jorgenson, Madison P.L., WI (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

An impending sense of dread hangs over Kepnes' cleverly claustrophobic debut, in which love takes on a whole new meaning. Told from the perspective of Joe Goldberg, a seemingly normal Manhattan bookstore employee, the narrative is structured like a long monologue to the titular "you": a young woman, Guinevere Beck, who becomes the object of Joe's obsessive affection. They meet casually enough at the bookstore, and since she's an aspiring writer just starting an MFA program, they bond over literature. Seems innocuous enough, even sweet, until we learn just how far Joe will go to make Beckher preferred namehis own. Kepnes makes keen use of modern technology to chronicle Joe and Beck's "courtship": He not only stalks her on Twitter, but hacks into her email account and, after casually lifting her cellphone, monitors her text messages. In Joe's mind, he's keeping Beck safe from what he perceives as dangers in her life, particularly the clingy, wealthy Peach Salinger (yes, a relative of that Salinger); Beck's hard-partying ex, Benji; and her therapist, the smooth-talking Dr. Nicky. When Joe and Beck finally, inevitably get together, it only serves to ratchet up Joe's predatory, possessive instincts. Every text is analyzed as if it were the German Enigma Code, and every email is parsed and mined for secret meaning. There's little doubt that the relationship is doomed, but Kepnes keeps the reader guessing on just how everything will implode. There's nothing romantic about Joe's preoccupation with Beck, but Kepnes puts the reader so deep into his head that delusions approach reality. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

The day Guinevere Beck walks into Joe Goldberg's East Village bookstore, life for both of them will never be the same. Guinevere is a hot young thing, beautiful, creative, and tough, recently transplanted to New York City to attend graduate school. Beck is Joe's dream girl, everything he has ever wanted in a significant other. When Joe rescues her in the subway, a grateful Beck agrees to go out with him. Thus begins a relationship defined by passion, obsession, and even murder. Joe becomes the ultimate stalker. He spies on Beck through her curtainless windows and gains access to her e-mails and tweets by stealing her phone. Written in the second person, You is the story of one man's life, a life where love becomes obsession, and obsession becomes murder, experienced and perpetrated by a character who is strangely likable despite his bad behavior. Kepnes, a television writer and journalist, has written a deeply dark yet mesmerizing first novel of two people caught in a romantic tangle with an ever-tightening knot. Copyright 2014 Booklist Reviews.

When Joe Goldberg meets Guinevere Beck in the East Village bookstore where he works, he instantly knows that she's the one for him. Sure, he thought the same about Candace, but Candace is no longer in his life and he's sure that Guinevere is the one. The only problem is Guinevere doesn't seem to know it yet. So Joe gives her some time. Time he spends watching her, hacking her computer, and even saving her from her mistakes. When she drunkenly falls onto the subway tracks late at night, he's there to offer her a hand. And when he realizes her boyfriend Benji is cheating on her, Joe gets Benji out of the way. In fact, Joe will do pretty much anything, including commit murder, to make sure that Guinevere becomes his. VERDICT Kepnes certainly has the creepy factor down in her debut novel, taking readers deep into Joe's thoughts and feelings, to extremely suspenseful effect. And Joe is entirely believable as the stalker from hell. Though there are no ghosts and the only thing that goes bump in the night is Joe, this will appeal to fans of psychological horror.—Jane Jorgenson, Madison P.L., WI

Debut novelist Kepnes's seriously unsettling depiction of stalking nevertheless manages to invoke glimmers of sympathy for its perpetrator. Joe is working as a clerk at a bookstore on New York City's Lower East Side when M.F.A. writing student Guinevere Beck (known as Beck) saunters in. Joe knows immediately that they're meant to be together. What follows is a chronicle of Joe's psychotic preoccupation with Beck, told in Joe's relentless, alternately passionate and vitriolic narration and addressed to Beck as "you." Astonishingly enough, his fixation materializes into a relationship of sorts. Joe, who is well-read but never attended college, has a chip on his shoulder about his education and class status and the assumptions people make about him. Beck, for her part, prefers to stir up dramas rather than seriously work on her writing. What's most chilling about this novel, besides its plausibility, is the way in which Kepnes makes the reader empathize with Joe during the journey into his troubled mind. Her book will have readers looking over their shoulders—and examining their own motivations. Agent: Jennifer Rudolph Walsh and Claudia Ballard, WME Entertainment. (Sept.)