Book Review: SEEMS PERFECT

Title: Seems Perfect

Author: Rebecca Hanover

Publisher: Lake Union Publishing

Pages: 267

My GoodReads Rating: ⭐⭐⭐

When a debilitating injury and subsequent surgery leave 32-year-old yoga teacher Emily Hawthorne unable to work or pay her utility bills or her mortgage, she decides to advertise for a paying roommate to share her one-bedroom apartment. Penelope ‘Pip’ Stone answers the ad, and Emily can see that she seems perfect. Pip is affable, friendly and hard-working.

But then Pip moves in too much stuff and a preteen daughter, Sophie, that Emily knows nothing about. With her only living relative, Aunt Viv, living with dementia in an assisted living facility, and having broken up with her fiancé, Seth, out of fear that she might die of cancer as her parents did, Emily is all alone. She is fair game for Pip who quickly begins a devious game of manipulation and gaslighting, taking worse liberties.

Will Emily ever be rid of Pip? Will she get her house back?

The story is written in the first person PoV of Emily, besides occasional 3^rd person PoVs of Pip and Sophie. The 3^rd person PoVs were the author’s way of humanizing Pip and explaining why she is the way she is, but I hated her all the same.

Right away we know that Pip spells bad news, but Emily ignores all the red flags. She comes across as naïve. She has the most basic password on her wi-fi. I dislike stupid Main Characters, and Emily was just that. She kept making allowances for Pip’s wrongdoing, and that made me want to tear out my hair.

But of course, if she wasn’t stupid, we’d have no story. But it would have been better if there had been some other way in which Emily had found herself sharing her home with Pip.

Breaking up with her fiancé because she fears dying of cancer is another weak angle. Today there are tests that can reveal one’s risk profile for cancer.

I strongly wanted to DNF this book. Emily was just so annoying in her naivete. Even when she takes action to reclaim her home and her life, the solutions she comes up with are rather daft. The only reason why I kept reading was because I felt invested in the situation. Emily only pulled up her socks at the 27% mark. Even then, there was no explanation for why she didn’t confide in best friend, Ally, or her ex-fiancé, Seth.

At one point, she tells us that Pip has isolated her from her best friend and fiance, but that is not true. Emily herself takes the decision to resolve the problem by herself. 

The author has a tendency to overwrite a point long after it’s been made. Towards this end, she provides too many details over and over again.

Emily describes herself as a yogi. The right word is yogini. A yogi refers to a male practitioner of yoga. Also, yogic breath is not a thing. Yogic technique of breathing, or even yogic breathing, would be more accurate.

(I read this book on NetGalley. Thank you to the author, the publisher and NetGalley.)