Watching You by Lisa Jewell - Review

I picked this up in The Works a few weeks ago because I've really enjoyed the Lisa Jewell books I've read recently and liked the sound of this one, too. It was only £4 and I picked it up only a month after buying it. I really liked it. It's not exactly high brow literature but I think I got a lot of enjoyment out of it, and at this point in my life that's what I want and need. 

So at the beginning of the book a body is found in a house in Bristol. The house belongs to Tom and Nicola Fitzwilliam and their son, Freddie. A woman is then being interviewed by the police. Her name is Joey and she lives just a couple of doors down. She is a suspect in the murder and it becomes clear that she would have a motive for murder. 

However, in this book, really nothing is at it seems. No one is as they seem. There are a lot of characters and a lot of people have motive for murder. 

So. Tom is a 'super head' headmaster, the type of one who goes to problem schools for a year or two, solves the problems, and then moves on. His wife Nicola is a lot younger than him. Their son Freddie is fourteen and honestly, he's a bit of a creep. He spends his time logging the movements of neighbours and he is obsessed with two of the girls at Tom's school, Jenna and Bess. He takes photos of them from his attic bedroom window and he becomes obsessed with a girl called Romola who goes to private school, as he does too. He feels like he is the only person in the world who doesn't 'get' just how amazing Tom Fitzwilliam is. Nicola is obsessed with Tom, pandering to his every wish. She is a bit of a bland person, she doesn't have a lot of personality of her own. 

Tom's house is up in Melville Heights, above the rest of the village, and the row of houses are brightly painted and quite posh. Two doors down belong to Jack and Rebecca. They are married and expecting a baby. Jack is a surgeon and utterly go getting and brilliant. Rebecca is a systems analyst and spends most of her time in her office in the house, dilligently working. Jack's sister Joey and her husband Alfie are living in the attic. Joey is ten years younger than Jack and has just been a flightly type of person her whole life. She was working as a rep in Ibiza when she met Alfie, and they quickly got married and have moved home. Joey thinks she needs to be grown up and settled down now, but she's working at a children's play centre and she's living with her brother, so her life isn't exactly going how she thought it might be. 

Joey meets Tom and is infatuated with him. He likes her, too, and there's definitely something between them. But what exactly? 

Then there's Jenna. She's fifteen and about to do her GCSEs. She is one of the popular girls at school; her best friend is Bess. Jenna's mum, Frances, is mentally unwell and think that Tom is stalking her. She is obsessed with 'gang stalkers' and she thinks that Tom watches her from his house. She also thinks that he is a man that was involved in an incident on holiday in the Lake District several years prior, where a man, his wife and child were on a coach trip, and a woman came up to the man and started hitting him, shouting angrily at him. Jenna knows her mother is ill but lives in fear of anyone finding out. Her dad and brother live several towns away, and she doesn't want to have to leave her school. Her mum does a lot of things that are verging on illegal if not actually illegal. 

She doesn't really care about Tom Fitzwilliam, but Bess is obsessed with him. On a school trip to Spain, Tom and Bess stay up talking late one night and Jenna thinks something is going on between them. I loved the depiction of these two teenage girls, it felt really true in how they acted. I liked that my feelings towards Freddie changed throughout the book. And I liked how people really weren't as they seemed. 

I will say that there felt to be maybe just one too many coincidences for this to be real, but that didn't bother me too much. I liked the setting of this claustrophobic row of houses looking down upon this village. I was entertained by the book and am giving it four out of five.