The Perfect Girlfriend: A Novel

This is not your typical romance novel. This is a psychological thriller told through the eyes of the sociopath who ultimately feels it is her "destiny" to be together with her "boyfriend."

If you are looking for a traditional romance, this would not be a good choice for you. If you are looking for something edgy and different with a great look inside the airline crew world then this is a great book for you.

The fact that the boyfriend is with another and pledged to her is irrelevant - well, at least nothing that a little murder cannot fix.

The authoress actually worked in the airline industry so the descriptions of the training, the flights, the layovers, and cities the heroine (dark heroine) visits all ring true.

I will not give away how the book ends because you need to read it, and telling you how things resolve (or don't) would candidly ruin this particular book.

My one nit is that the author does not portray a sociopath entirely accurately. (It is probably a darn good thing that we live in a world where few can be in a monster's head with any level of credibility.) Koontz, Saberhagen, King, ... all do a great job at portraying that tortured landscape.

In this book, the author takes a first person viewpoint, but focuses on the character's odd qualities and OCD which are not really directly related to sociopathy. (It is kind of the same thing as equating Aspberger's with something dire. In this case, it took me out of the story a bit.)

All in all, it is a gripping tale with a lot of great detail about the airline industry.

When Elizabeth was 10 & her brother was 4, he drowned while in her care. Their mum (who was always fond of drink) had "moods" & when one engulfed her, it was Elizabeth's job to watch her brother until their mum could cope again. Inside Elizabeth exists a sense of dread that has never left her.

When Elizabeth was a teenager, her mother sent her to boarding school. Bella was assigned to look after her. Bella's older brother, Nate, took Elizabeth's virginity, when she was only 15. Bella & her friends teased and bullied Elizabeth. They called her horrible names. She would have forgiven Bella anything to be a part of her world. Without love & acceptance, all that's left within her is something dark and hateful. She wants Bella to experience heartbreak & humiliation.

Ten years later, Juliette emerged. Elizabeth started using her middle name & morphed into a new identity as an airline employee where Nate is a pilot. All that separates her from Nate is a mere steel cockpit door. She desperately wants a happy-ever-after & he IS going to give it to her.

After 7 months on the job, she hatches a plan for them to spend a romantic night together. She slips a Rohypnol in his Kir Royale, takes him to the marriage license bureau and a chapel where they are pronounced husband & wife. She sees a future for them. He doesn't. He contacts his lawyer & proceeds with an annulment. He wants to be rid of her. She will tether Nate to her out of revenge. She becomes a danger to others; especially, the women that Nate dates. She's a deranged, delusional person who will do anything to get what she wants.

Elizabeth/Juliette is just creepy and out of her mind. It's like watching a trainwreck in slow motion. She is just cold and soul dead with no sympathic qualities. Even with disturbed, vicious main characters, they need to be engaging and have some redeeming quality to make me care about their point of view in the story. I never found Elizabeth anything other than awful.

The book opens with a very bad thing that, I guess, was supposed to establish the groundwork for why she is a sociopath. It does explain some of her crazy, but I'm not a fan of the flashback info dump technique and this book does it often. It just takes you out of any building tension in the plot.

This book is not bad by any means, but it just never felt smooth and moved slowly for me. I never found a reason to care about Elizabeth or feel anything other than pity for Nathan. I actually stopped halfway through and read an entire second novel before wanting to return to The Perfect Girlfriend. I'm sure other folks will love this, but it just wasn't for me.

There are so many psychological thrillers right now and I've read a lot of them. A few stick with me, but many are quickly forgotten. The Perfect Girlfriend is one that was entertaining enough, but will easily be forgotten a month or two from now.

The suspense of this story kept me reading and wanting to know how things end, so the story was intriguing enough that I didn't abandon book. However, the characters are all unlikable, and the initial scene where a tragedy occurs (and perhaps is meant to explain Juliette's later behavior), isn't really fleshed out. I also found some of the plot twists entirely unbelievable.

Some readers will probably find this a very entertaining, suspenseful read. It isn't a horrible book. But with so many psychological thrillers out there, this isn't the one I'd press into anyone's hands.

Thanks to NetGalley and Harlequin-Graydon House Books for a preview copy of this book in return for an honest review. The book had potential. When I read the synopsis I was intrigued by the story of an ex-girlfriend who was determined to win back the love of a man she felt she deserved. I was disappointed and wanted to give up reading it but struggled to its ending.

The story is told in the first person by Juliette, the psycho ex-girlfriend whose stalking and plotting became boring to me. It lacked suspense. I felt it needed other narrators with their points of view which would give the reader a break from the rambling narrative as Juliette becomes more deranged and desperate. The last part of the book becomes overdramatic and implausible.

I felt the flashbacks did not contribute to the plot and failed to evoke any feeling of sympathy in me for her dreadful behaviour towards acquaintances and especially towards Nate who ended their relationship six months earlier. Juliette seemed completely without conscience. Unfortunate events in her past might have led to depression or other emotional problems, but not to the psychopathic personality she seemed to possess.

Her extreme stalking behaviour included not only following people. She made copies of their keys and would sneak into apartments, planting an app to monitor computer activity, reading their Facebook postings, etc. She even got a job on the same airline where Nate was a pilot.

Because she remained so in love with Nate she was determined to have a life with him through any means necessary. This obsessive love was not reciprocated and she was increasingly making his life miserable. His feelings had no impact on her. Her intrusion into his family events in the latter part of the book was farfetched and chaotic.

Does Juliette win the life with Nate that she felt she deserved? Does the abrupt open-ended/non-ending give the reader the fate they think she deserved?

I usually get as many books for my Mom as I can. She loves to read and I mean she LOVES to read. Usually a book a day or day and half. She loves romance novels so when I noticed that this book book stated that "you've never read a love story as twisted as this", I got it for her thinking it was a love story. It is a love story However it is more of a suspense and that is on me. Mom said the book was OK, but remember she loves a good romance novel. This book was read in a couple of days over the holidays. The story line and the writing style did keep her reading. She will let me know when its a bad book but I never got this comment from her.

I never tell about the book itself as I DO NOT want to spoil anything for another reader. Mom may give me a synopsis about the book but I never talk about the story line. Hate it when someone tells me something about the story that occurs 3/4 the way thru a book or a reviewer tells me they do finally get married. I don’t want you spoiling my reading and I do not want to spoil your reading when it comes to a good book. I figure it you are wanting to know a little about the story, you can read the synopsis that Amazon and the author gives you.

She is going to tell the ladies at her Beauty Shop Book Group about this book as it was worth reading, it is just more of a suspense novel than an all out romance. Still a good read.

You know when you read a book, and you know logically who you are supposed to like and dislike, and somehow you feel the exact opposite? That describes how I read The Perfect Girlfriend in a nutshell!!! This book is T-W-I-S-T-E-D!!! I sat down to write this and I wasn’t even sure how to begin because this is one of the strangest and most entertaining books I’ve read in ages—in a good way!

Oh, Juliette… Or should I say Lily? Or Elizabeth? Juliette has as many names to switch around from as she has personalities and I was LIVING for it. Told in first person narrative, Juliette tells the story of what happens after the love of her life breaks up with her. Ok, so maybe she didn’t handle the break up that well. But now she is giving him exactly what he asked for—space! So he will come back to her at the end, right? He will definitely understand what she did to meet his needs.

Juliette is playing the long game. She could arrange a meet-up at any time if she wanted to, but she has this planned out. Slow and steady. Stick to the plan. Everything will work out if you stick to the plan. And so we see her applying for his airline, going through the long flight attendant trainings (seriously, flight attendant training at many companies takes about 8 weeks), and then building up her seniority on her flight schedule.

Juliette should have friends to show she isn’t needy, right? So she makes a friend. And by the way, their friendship was SO entertaining! It was such a delightful part of the storyline, particularly Amy’s reactions to a few odd things Juliette does, and then in Juliette’s monologue we hear her “I guess it was a bit odd…” It kept cracking me up! Because, YES. Juliette is at a minimum a bit odd, and more accurately she is off her rocker.

And this brings me to who I should like and dislike, and I oddly found myself rooting for Juliette and all of her crazy ideas! She was just SO entertaining and persistent. A person like Juliette is capable of an extreme amount of focus, which oddly enough made her an outstanding employee…most of the time. And even though she is absolutely someone who needs serious help, everyone who has been cruelly dumped, bullied, or mistreated will find a small amount of delight in her revenge plots.

The writing on this book is divine. So much of this book happens inside of Juliette’s head, and yet she often doesn’t clue you in on her plan in advance, so we see it unfold in shocking real time. And here is where we should give all of the credit to Karen Hamilton’s writing. Her story is gripping and hard to put down, though much of it is inner monologue. And she also finds a way to humanize and make Juliette sympathetic, despite the fact that she is absolutely vindictive and crazy.

There’s a sequence of events that occur around 50% and set in motion the second half of the book that had me shocked and delighted by the sheer amazingness of it all! Juliette is someone who is capable of such restraint. But the moment she gets what she wanted, she hits the fast forward button and she is off to the races. She has no in between speed. She is slow and methodical or all-in. And that is one of the many reasons I think she can be attractive as a character. Nothing in Juliette’s life happens due to anything other than extreme mental focus and over-the-top heart.

Thank you to Harelquin’s publicity team for my copy. Opinions are my own.

The perfect Girlfriend is about the most psychotic sociopath of a woman you will ever read about. So much so that at times the book is funny. Juliette doesn’t have a single stable cell in her body. If you ever meet someone and they say they felt sympathy for her and what happened to her...run! Change your locks, move, change your name even. The fact that a woman wrote this book makes it more believable.
A great summer book!

Karen Hamilton has crafted a book that will keep you up very late reading. The Perfect Girlfriend is a novel about obsession and revenge.The title character, Lily will make both happen if it takes her the rest of her life. No sacrifice is too great. Especially if someone else is paying the cost. If revenge is a dish best served cold, Lily is dry ice. She is so single minded in her pursuit that she fails to see the good in her life. Everything she does is a monumental quest that takes years but she cannot and will not stop. The object of her desire is no match for the machinations of her twisted and frightening mind. This story is one you will not forget. It is so well thought out that even the mundane makes you think twice. All of us have been hurt, or humiliated to some degree in life. This book will tell you a tale of what can happen when those thoughts and feelings become a seething pit of retribution.

I had a hard time getting into tbe book at first but then the futher I read it got more interesting. The author does overuse the word "whilst" way too much and the ending was a cliff hanger.