Genre: Fiction; Thriller

Note: There are NO spoilers in this review. When discussing in the comments, please provide a spoiler warning if needed.

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐ / 5

I had high hopes starting Invisible Girl by Lisa Jewell. I read her novel And Then She Was Gone and absolutely loved it. Unfortunately, this time around didn’t do it for me and left me wanting more from the story. It’s marked as a thriller, but mostly it’s just a story about a few people keeping mildly interesting secrets to themselves until “the big reveal”.

Invisible Girl is a weird and winding story about Owen Pick, a 30-year-old living in his aunt’s spare bedroom; Saffyre Maddox, a girl stalking her ex-therapist; and the Fours family. 

Everyone around Owen expects the worst and his life is beginning to fall apart. He’s pushed to his final breaking point after he’s identified as the last person to see Saffyre Maddox alive before she disappeared. Owen’s plot line is one of the more interesting parts of the novel, but for the first third of the book I hated it. In a time of frustration, Owen turns to the incel message boards. I was expecting that to take a different path, but it didn’t go as I predicted, which ultimately redeemed Owen as a character for me. 

Then there is Saffyre Maddox. Mysteriously disappeared, stalking her ex-psychologist, and holding a secret she’s afraid to tell anyone. Once she confides in an unexpected confidant, her story begins to unfold and ultimately leads to her disappearance. I think a lot of girls and women will be able to identify with Saffyre’s story. While I did like this character, I just found the reasons around her disappearance a little over-dramatic and a let down after the build up of the entire novel.

“It’s amazing how boring you can get away with being when you’re pretty. No one seems to notice. When you’re pretty everyone just assumes you must have a great life. People are so short-sighted, sometimes. People are so stupid.”

Lisa Jewell, Invisible Girl

And last, but certainly not least, we have the Fours Family. From the start of the novel I hated the father of the family – Roan. I typically assume the worst in men, and in his case I was right. Everyone in the family has secrets of their own and enough gaslighting to go around. 

And I can’t mention Roan without calling out his wife Cate. While I did like Cate, she’s your stereotypical nosey neighbor who can’t just leave people alone. She’s watching, listening, and ultimately drawing shit conclusions about people she doesn’t even know. If not for her drawing conclusions about her “weird neighbor” the story would have unfolded differently.  

This entire novel is about three or four plot lines all tangled together by a handful of events, mostly centered around the night Saffyre Maddox disappeared. While it works, it almost doesn’t. It feels like Lisa Jewell forced the weaving of these characters and it doesn’t feel natural to me. 

And, of course, you know if you’ve read any of my other reviews – I can’t stand a thriller where everything works out perfectly in the end. The characters get the resolution they want/should expect with all of the loss being in the court of our “bad guys”. Maybe I’m terrible for wanting the characters, even the good ones, to suffer a little, but here we are. 

If you want to read a thriller by Lisa Jewell, I will recommend And Then She Was Gone a million times over Invisible Girl. This one didn’t hit the mark for me, and I don’t think it will for many others.