One normal day, Anna witnesses a car accident where a motorcycle is hit by a car. It turns out that the driver of the car is Carla, the woman who ruined her life thirteen years ago. Anna wants to exact revenge but doesn’t want to reveal herself to Carla yet. Instead, she visits the motorcycle driver, Liam, in the hospital as he’s recovering and makes friends with Liam and his grandmother.
As we learn more about Anna, we start to question whether or not her obsession with Carla is warranted or if Anna herself is hiding secrets…
I have to say, I LOVED K.L. Slater’s other book, Blink, and was so excited to read this one, but was left disappointed. This was not my favorite book. I know that this was her first book, so I’m thinking since I loved Blink that her books have gotten better with time.
The story jumped back and forth between Anna in the past and Anna in the present time, but also has chapters told from the perspective of a variety of characters including Liam, Carla, a detective, Anna’s supervisor at work, and so on. This made it really difficult for me to stay engaged in the story because I was constantly having to go back and check whose point of view I was reading and in what timeline. Some of the chapters felt irrelevant to the story, too, which took me out of the main narrative.
Additionally, I felt like there were a number of loose ends that weren’t tied up to my liking. For example, Anna talks repeatedly about a bad smell that starts happening in her apartment, but it’s never uncovered what the smell was…I thought it would have relevance to the story, but NOPE. There were also some discrepancies in Anna and Carla’s ages. In the chapters set in the past, they were said to be one age, but in the present day chapters, they were said to be an age that wouldn’t add up to the 13 missing years.
I also HATED Anna as a character, and to be honest, I can’t think of a single character I did like. I felt like Anna was nuts. She was constantly making decisions and justifying them to herself when no normal sane person would make the same decisions. For example, Anna decides she needs to break into Liam’s apartment so she could “feed his cat” using a key that he doesn’t know she has. That’s already weird enough, but then she proceeds to hack into his facebook account, go through his messages, and then make a copy of his key to keep “just in case” – all of this done without her knowledge. It just left me thinking she was crazy and I was not rooting for her AT ALL.
Then the end happened, and I was left feeling like “that’s it?” I felt like there was a lot of unnecessary parts to the story – like the entire plotline where Anna can’t deliver all of her mail on time, but then the ending felt rushed and not everything was neatly wrapped up.
That said, I did enjoy the writing of the book and I feel like Slater has a great writing style and way with words that makes reading her books quick and easy. Overall, I feel like she’s learned from her first book, and her second book Blink, was much more of a win for me. I’m excited to see her continue to write and evolve as an author. I do also want to note, that Safe With Me has a lot of positive reviews, so it’s absolutely possible that I just wasn’t the right reader for this story.
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