Twisty and Clever: A Review Of A.J. Finn's The Woman in the Window

I was beaming with expectations when I started reading A.J. Finn’s The Woman in the Window. On finishing the book, I realized it deserves every amount of acclaim that it has received. My mind was literally blown away towards the end, when the final twist is revealed, and by that time I could kill to know what happened. The story follows Anna Fox, a child psychologist with agoraphobia, who because of her illness has been confined to the four walls of her house for almost ten months. Her only doorway to the outside world is a window in her house, through which she observes the lives of her neighbours and takes interest in monitoring their activities everyday. Anna gets a new object of interest when the Russells move into the house across the park and she is drawn towards observing every member of the family because their family reminds her of her own. But one day, Anna witnesses something with changes her relationship with the Russells forever. Anna is shaken and she doesn’t even know whether she can trust herself with all the wine she had been drinking. How can Anna get to the root of everything? Will she ever be able to do so?

The first half of the book was a bit too slow paced for me, as I naturally love fast paced thrillers. No major events were happening to invoke my suspense but it was the writing style that kept me hooked. It probably takes that amount of time to build up the plot, but once it is done, there is no going back. It keeps you at the edge of your seat till the last page. Every loose end is tied everything falls into place.

The writing style is very unique, which plays a key role in developing the suspense. Short and crisp sentences, and every sentence seems to have an underlying element of suspense in it, as if trying to say more than what it literally implies. The characters are well written, wonderfully developed and blended in harmonically with the plot as the story progresses. The are sub-twists throughout the books which are hard to guess (if not impossible!) but the final twist steals the show. The entire book is written in a manipulative fashion, a tool a lot of thriller writers use to divert the readers’ mind to a particular direction to make the final twist more surprising. And that only adds to thrill of it all (Lol, did I just say I love to be manipulated? Well, yes in a book :P)!

Go ahead and read it if you want some spine chilling experience and you will get the best of it!

My Rating – 4.5/5

Happy Reading! 😇

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