You Should Have Known

By: Jean Hanff Korelitz

Narrated by: Christina Delaine

Length: 16 hrs and 32 mins

Publisher's summary

Listen to the "rollickingly good literary thriller" and New York Times best seller that's the inspiration for the HBO limited series The Undoing, premiering October 25 and starring Nicole Kidman and Hugh Grant (Vanity Fair).

Grace Reinhart Sachs is living the only life she ever wanted for herself. Devoted to her husband, a pediatric oncologist at a major cancer hospital, their young son Henry, and the patients she sees in her therapy practice, her days are full of familiar things: she lives in the very New York apartment in which she was raised, and sends Henry to the school she herself once attended.

Dismayed by the ways in which women delude themselves, Grace is also the author of a book You Should Have Known, in which she cautions women to really hear what men are trying to tell them. But weeks before the book is published a chasm opens in her own life: a violent death, a missing husband, and, in the place of a man Grace thought she knew, only an ongoing chain of terrible revelations.

Left behind in the wake of a spreading and very public disaster, and horrified by the ways in which she has failed to heed her own advice, Grace must dismantle one life and create another for her child and herself.

©2014 Jean Hanff Korelitz (P)2014 Hachette Audio

Grabber

Korelitz characters grab my mind. I squeeze in every free minute to keep listening! I'll get more Korelitz for sure!

A real page turner, but...

I enjoyed this story. It kept me on the edge of my seat. The reader was excellent. My only problem was how clueless the main character seemed throughout the first half of the book. She never seemed to ask herself why the police were questioning her, why strange things were happening, why she couldn't reach her husband. It's as though on some subconscious level she knew but didn't want to know, which is a hard premise to swallow when she is a therapist who wrote a book called "You Should Have Known." This made the book less than great in my mind, even though it was a fun read.

Truly a "Page Turner"

What did you love best about You Should Have Known?

It was suspenseful and richly textured. I liked it even better than "Gone Girl".

Who was your favorite character and why?

I liked the two NYPD detectives that she encounters. They were the contrast needed to highlight the privileged world that the main character lived in.

What does Christina Delaine bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?

She was excellent at selecting different voices without going "over the top".

If you could rename You Should Have Known, what would you call it?

Fool Me Once.......

Any additional comments?

LOVED this book.

Narcissistic Personality Disorder in story form!

Excellent description of a women in a narcissistic relationship, really well done description of how the mind, and process works as one comes to grips with being a victim of these malicious, malignant people. A must read to understand and be aware of this specific type of emotional abuse.

It’s good but it’s bloated

I’m glad I listened. It was very good. The narrator is incredible. I love her “Henry” voice.

I love long audio books, but this one was unnecessarily long. Character development and backstory is important, but there was A LOT of it. Parts are slow and drawn out. All in all it’s a good listen but didn’t knock me over.

would have returned it if I could have

purchased on a two-for-one sale could not return it. So I did listen to it but it was a struggle to finish it totally predictable in every way shape and form. Narration was pretty lackluster as well.

Wanted to love it more

It was just ok. A little slow. And anticlimactic. I kept wondering what the ah ha moment would be and it didn’t come.

Very different story from The Undoing

Interesting how the screenwriter used this as a starting point for the Nicolle Kidman/Hugh Grant film. There’s much more about the internal life of the female character. Drags a bit, almost too much detail. But in the end a satisfying listen.

A tad slow-going

This is my 3rd book by this author and was slightly disappointed. The listener spends a LONG time waiting for something, anything, to happen. It picks up the pace as it progresses but much of it is painfully slow.

Also, the reader makes an error: at one point referring to a character as “O’Malley” when the name is “O’Rourke.”

Not a waste of time — but not a fun one either!

watch out -- you will have trouble unplugging

i listened at 2x for 2 reasons: i wanted the next plot twist (that's good) and the narrative was bloated (that's bad). But you'll overlook the latter for the former. I thoroughly enjoyed this, for all the yucky Upper East Side self-satisfied parts of it, found it insightful and always absorbing.