2.5/5 ✩
You Shouldn’t Have Come Here is a mystery thriller that follows Grace Evans, a city girl who takes a vacation at an Airbnb in Wyoming. Grace is immediately drawn to Calvin Wells, the owner of the property she’s staying on, but something in the town doesn’t feel right. Though hesitant to stay, Grace decides to stay for the duration of her scheduled trip and grows very close to Calvin. But as time goes on and the town – and Calvin – start to seem even more unsafe, Grace realizes she might not actually make it back home.
**Warning: this review will contain spoilers**
From the get go, readers get the feel that the town is mysterious and unsafe. Other than Calvin, the people that live in the town are unwelcoming and make continuous comments about how Grace shouldn’t have come to this town. Calvin also harps on the fact that he doesn’t want Grace to leave him, and on numerous occasions, characters comment that Grace isn’t going to leave town.
The story is told through dual points of view, so we get insight into both Grace’s and Calvin’s perspectives throughout the entire book, and although I always knew something was amiss, because the story was told through both Grace’s and Calvin’s perspectives, both characters seemed trustworthy.
It isn’t until just about the very, very end of the book that I realized something was off with both of our narrators. Not only has Calvin been lying about holding a woman hostage the entire story, but Grace is also not who she says she is.
Had we learned this information earlier in the novel, it would’ve felt more believable and even created a greater sense of suspense of who was going to survive at the end of the book, but by saving this reveal for SO late in the novel, it felt jumbled and rushed. It created a HUGE disconnect between me and the characters and I felt like I spent so long getting to know these characters only to have those conceptions stripped away with very little time to come to terms with that.
Until the end of the end of the novel, Grace presents herself as an innocent city girl looking for a little escape from reality. Calvin, on the other hand, appears to be a welcoming Airbnb host with a twisted family history who wants nothing more than to share his lifestyle with a beautiful woman.
In reality, Grace’s real name isn’t even Grace and she reveals that she takes regular trips out of her hometown and away from her loving family to commit murder. Similarly, Calvin routinely holds women hostage on his property.
Because of the false sense of trust the author builds between reader and character, many of the characters’ actions then feel unbelievable. It’s hard to grasp that Grace would be so fearful for her own life – particularly when she wakes up with night terrors thinking Calvin has tried to harm her – when it’s evident that she knows how to defend herself and is more than capable of murder. In fact, she thrives on the act.
I can understand why the author would incorporate this twist – it’s something I never saw coming, and as a mystery thriller writer, that’s exactly what you want to do, though I do not think that the way she executed this was successful. Additionally, as a big reader and writer myself, I noticed there were more than a few grammatical and tense errors in the writing which made it difficult for me to fully immerse myself in the writing at all. The writing felt rushed and a little bit mundane to me, almost like the author was listing things instead of writing a cohesive story.
Anchored Musings 