 Hello everybody! E here. Welcome back to another book review. Today we are talking about The Invisible Girl by Lisa Jewel. If you've been following the channel at all over the past couple years, I get the new Lisa Jewel book from Atria Publishing, usually months in advance. This one's no different. They were kind enough to send me an ARC and I'll likely be getting the hardcover also, so I'll be doing a book birthday for it. I only do book birthdays for spoiler alert for books that I absolutely love and I love this one. I have never read a book that had a character or themes or anything along the lines of insoles in voluntary celibates. I know what they are. It's men who are celibate not because they don't like or want to have sex with women, but because they can't seem to find someone who is willing to. Sorry I'm laughing, but I think it's a very goofy and maybe even unstable mindset to think that you're entitled to another person's body in any way, shape or form. Jewel dives into the world of insoles, going into the chat rooms and things like that, just delving deep into this one character. His name is Owen Pick. He has been publicly shamed. He's kind of lost his job. It's ambiguous until the end whether or not he's going to have the job or not, but because he lives this lifestyle, because he is so awkward and maybe even creepy to some people. He's in trouble with the law. He gets in trouble with the law about a missing girl. The reader knows certain things about Owen Pick that the rest of the characters in the book don't know because you get an actual POV from him. There's only one first person POV and that's from the missing girl, but the rest of them are third person POVs. You get one from Kate who is the mother of two kids and is married to a therapist and they live across the street from Owen. But Owen is the star here, I feel. The book is really about him, even though Sapphire, the girl that's missing, I think it's even above because he gets so much more character development and he gets a full arc from one character to another. What I mean by that is he grows as a character. There's no stagnation there with him, whereas Kate pretty much is the same person at the beginning as she is at the end and Sapphire pretty much the same also. I love the twist and turns. By the end though, and I've said this before about Jules' work, by the end though, it gets a little heavy-handed with the twists. I think there was like eight different twists there at the end and it kept on going, that's not, Jules, wait! There's more, you know, that kind of thing. And it was all the way up until the very last sentence of the book. And sometimes that gets a bit much. It didn't take away from the book at all, for me at least, because I'm a constant reader, man. I'm all about the journey instead of the destination. And while the main twist of the book is pretty much what I expected, there was some stuff that I didn't see coming, but I kept going back to, hey, maybe it's this other person. Hey, maybe this other person does whatever. And that's when a Jules strong point. She keeps you guessing all the way to the end, even if the ending is a twist on every page kind of deal. The writing is great. It's always great with Jules. That's why I love Jules. I don't read too many thrillers nowadays. I usually tend to go more for what people are calling domestic thrillers, where it doesn't have too much to do with the cops, even though there's a lot of cop stuff in this. It's more about the relationships with, you know, families and people and internal, you know, stuff, the stuff that makes good characters. You know, you have to care about what happens to someone before, you know, before you can care when something bad happens. I mean, I know that sounds redundant, but it's true. If you don't get to know people, there's no depth of empathy. And so you can be empathetic, of course, but I relate it to, you know, some male authors have a problem with this. Just to make a female character to a likable or whatever, they'll automatically make them pregnant and put them in trouble. That's not character development. That's a character attribute in my eyes. But it's easy to care about a pregnant woman because, you know, she's pregnant. But that's also lazy character development because she's also a human being. She's also a person. With Julie, you never have that problem, of course. There's always a reason to, if you don't agree with people, if you don't like them, you at least understand them. And that's why I love the character of Owen Pick. And he's the star of the show for me because everybody else is pretty much everyone else that you read about in every other domestic thriller. But with Owen's storyline and the whole Insel subplot, that was terrific. Actually, I don't think it's a subplot. I'm pretty sure it's like the whole theme of the book. Not the Insel thing, but what Owen goes through, the public shaming, the judgment by social media, the judgment by the public eye, before he's even found guilty of a crime. It's just the supposition that, of course, if they found all this other stuff, he has to be guilty. And by the end, you truly don't know whether or not, well, not by the end. But for the majority of the book, you truly don't know if this man is guilty until the end. And I thought that was super, super well done. Jule just keeps on getting better and better. I've loved everything that she has published, period, that I've read, of course. I think watching you, I found you. I think I gave both of those five stars, the family upstairs. I think I gave four or five. I'm not sure. But it's just, she's getting better. And I love that when an author will take the time to hone their craft and try to do better every single time. And even if they fail, you can usually tell when they're trying. I think Stephen King is definitely like that. And I love that about him. And I absolutely love Lisa Jule. She's an autobi for me. Even though they send me the final copy along with an ARC, I go out and I buy her books also. I usually tend to give them to friends. But I go out and buy them also. And I really suggest that anybody who gets ARCs do the same thing if you're able to to support the author that you love. But anyway, so if you read Invisible Girls, I always want to, I keep on wanting to say the Invisible Girl. Invisible Girl by Lisa Jule, it comes out on 10, it comes out on October 13th. I will leave links to the pre-orders down there in the doobly-doo. But if you read it, did you get an ARC? Let me know down there in the doobly-doo whether or not you loved it, whether or not you hated it. And tell me why you loved it or hated it so that we can have a discussion. But until next time, I have an E, you have an U. This has been another Book Review. I'll talk to you guys later. Bye-bye.