This is the discussion, including spoilers, for Watch Me by Judy Gehrman. For the review, click here.
The thing about this book is that it kept me just interested enough to keep reading and not abandon, but not quite interested enough to really care. Part of that had to do with the characters being mostly unlikable. Kate seemed kind of bitchy, and very foolish. There was an air of desperation about her. I think maybe she was supposed to seem vulnerable, but she’s a strong lady, and it ended up just coming across as foolish, simply put. It was hard to feel sympathy for her because she knew the position she was putting herself in by getting close to her student and she also knew that he was somewhat unstable. And yet she kept letting herself get drawn in. For such a smart woman, she was incredibly stupid. Even when she suspected Sam had broken into her house, she still let him in again the next time he came by. It reminded me of various memes and blog posts that I’d seen when Fifty Shades was released about how if Christian Grey had been unattractive this would’ve been a completely different story. I don’t want to say Kate seemed shallow, because she was also interested in Sam for his writing, his creative mind. But his body came up a lot in her narration. And then there is her coldness. Toward her students this could be forgivable, especially if she hadn’t entertained the idea of an affair with one of them. It could be argued that she was trying to remain professional. But her coldness toward her best friend who just had a baby made her very unsympathetic in this reader’s eyes.
As for Sam, though we were supplied with information about his backstory, his narration felt stilted and thin. You get that he’s disturbed, and that he clearly follows his own moral compass, but you don’t really get a feeling of how he came to be this way. And though he demonstrates his strained relationship with his mother and lack of any father figure, that didn’t feel like proper motivation for his utter lack of empathy. Sure, psychopaths exist and they murder unprovoked, but when you’re in the mind of the killer you should receive more substance than what we got from Sam’s narration. And that’s not to say that the attacks he perpetrated in the novel’s timeframe were “unprovoked”… Sam had his reasons. The thing is that Sam is portrayed as both obsessive and apathetic and that just doesn’t really jive in my head.
8%. Sam has a real Holden Caulfield hipster vibe going on with his 7 – 11 coffee, scoffing at the “trust fund babies” and “free trade soy lattes”. If he calls one of these people phonies I’m gonna lose it.
With Kate’s coldness and Sam’s lack of empathy, I actually really found myself hoping that she would find his obsessiveness endearing and his murders charming and she’d run off with him after all. To be honest, I kind of can’t believe she didn’t. But her reaction when he storms the classroom, gun in hand, was calm and commanding. She saved a lot of lives by taking control of the situation. But even as it’s happening, she’s not thinking about the young lives at stake or all the untapped potential in the room. Even if she doesn’t value their writing, she should value their lives. Instead, she’s already thinking about how she can capitalize on this tragedy. So it’s very fitting that the epilogue is written by Kate to Sam in second person, the way his narration was written to her. But any hope the reader had that Kate was a good person going through a rough patch is dissolved right there. We could have seen her back on her feet, nurturing young minds, reconnecting with her friend or making new friends, thriving, caring for others… but instead, she’s dwelling on the past and this twisted young man, watching a man in a cafe watch a young girl and reminiscing on how much she enjoyed Sam’s attention.
If that was the author’s goal in writing this, then hats off to her. It just wasn’t where I would have liked the story to go or how I would have liked the characters to turn out.
Agree? Disagree? Comment and let me know what you thought.
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