GIVE ME YOUR HAND, MEGAN ABBOTT
Award winning American author Megan Abbott has written a thriller framed around the complexities of relationships that are quite often borne out of necessity and not affection. Competitors but not necessarily rivals, school relationships that don’t survive into adulthood, friendships for a season only.
Blood is a theme that river flows throughout the book, and this is a clinical inclusion to remind us that the inner lives of women are inextricably linked to their physical natures. Whether that dimension is evident or not from the outside, the power of it must be respected and acknowledged.
GIVE ME YOUR HAND plays on a small stage and this adds to the intimate menace of a read that slowly brings the conflict full circle right back to where it started, that being between two people who can’t seem to make it fully out of the orbit of each other. Female to female relationships could be the argued to be the most fraught and intense connections that women ever make, regardless of the sphere in which they come to exist.
Keeping it all close and personal, GIVE ME YOUR HAND is a carefully crafted work that drip feeds dread directly into the veins. You will need to commit yourself to the discovery as this book is comprised of a series of measured turns, rather than the relaying of screeching acts of violence. Small deliberate steps to a conclusion that is oddly satisfying. Don’t race to the end.