April showers in 2021 are bringing our favorite sociopathic bookworm back to us on the page, and eventually on the screen. Joe Goldberg is back, baby!
You Love Me by Caroline Kepnes is book three of the deliciously devious and dirty series, You. This time around, Joe is living in the Pacific Northwest in the dream home, complete with soundproof basement, which he intended to share with Love and their son, Forty. Yes, she named their kid after her twin brother. However, his plans fall through and her super-rich family paid him off to stay away and he finds himself alone… at least temporarily.
This time, Joe finds himself walking into the woman’s bookish domain: the library she runs. It’s a fun flip on the first book, when Guinevere Beck walked into his bookstore. (RIPBeck.) Joe wishes he was able to watch his son grow up and pursues MK with this twisted vision of getting an instant family with her and her teenage daughter. However, plot twist, she’s not as single as she lets on.
Joe breaks out his stalker skills to get close to MK. It’s always so strange to be inside Joe’s head and hear him rationalize the crazy things he does in order to try to earn love. This time around, he’s really trying to be a good guy and keep his nose clean. I found myself waiting for him to snap and go full Benji/Peach/Hendy but the deaths in You Love Me and almost disappointed at his heroic efforts to avoid trouble. Thankfully, trouble finds him anyways and he struggles to fix issues and win over this mature yet complicated woman.
I may have said too much about the plot already, so I’ll just say this is not quite the same Joe Goldberg we’ve come to know and love/be creeped out by. Brace yourself. This one gets twisted in totally different ways than the previous two books.
You Love Me released in April 2020, and while there was speculation season three of the Netflix show based on Kepnes’ series would be close behind, there’s no official release date listed at this time. Big time bummer. Even once you read this one, fans can still look forward to suspense on screen. Season two divulged somewhat from the source material in Hidden Bodies so I am eager to see what (if anything) translates between the two for the third installments. Since casting announcements have different names listed, we could be in for a Joe multiverse. That’s a kinda scary thought… yikes.
Anyways, I gave You Love Me four stars. Good Joe isn’t quite as much fun as bad Joe with a cage, but it is still a dark and twisty delight.
Order your copy of You Love Me here.
Literary HypeWoman 