You Are My Only: Review

Title: You Are My Only

Author: Beth Kephart

Release Date: October 2011

Published By: EgmontUSA

Pages: 256

Goodreads Rating: 3.75 stars

Review: Emmy's only joy in her otherwise miserable life is her baby, but one day she turns around to find her gone. Fourteen years later, Sophie is being moved from place to place by her mother, running from what she knows only as the "No Good". It's only when she breaks her mother's rules and leaves the house to meet her new neighbor that she begins to uncover secrets about her past, and what she finds changes her life forever.

I was really looking forward to YOU ARE MY ONLY because I was hoping for a suspenseful, psychological novel, the kind I'm always on the look-out for. Unfortunately, I found myself rather disappointed by this book. This may be due in part to the high expectations I had for it, but there were several aspects I was quite unsatisfied by.

To start with, I didn't feel the dual perspective was done as well as it could have been. I agree that it would work just fine for a story like this, but I ended up preferring one narrator (Sophie) over the other (Emmy), so I was interested in one half of the book and not the other. This imbalance contributed in part to a feeling I had towards the whole story: some parts held my attention, and others couldn't.

There were several scenes where my attention was a hundred percent grabbed and I couldn't stop reading, and then there were times when I was bored by the book and started counting pages until the end. This gave me a general lukewarm feeling about this novel, but that's not to say that this was a bad book, or something I didn't enjoy at all.

I have to particularly commend the author on the story and how it was executed. Apart from the multiple point of view, the writing was done very well, and the story created was haunting and occasionally suspenseful. This book gave me an ache in my chest, and if only the story was adjusted to be gripping the whole time and not just some of the time, this could have been even more emotional.

All in all, YOU ARE MY ONLY had a great deal of potential and certainly lived up to some of it, but not all. The story itself was chilling at times and the writing was for the most part beautiful, but the dual perspective was imbalanced and didn't work as well as it could have. There were also too many places where the storyline dragged and my attention was easily lost. I'm not sure if I'd recommend this particular book, but I certainly look forward to reading other books by this author.


I received a free copy of this book from the publisher for review. This in no way affected my review.