I wasn’t sure if I would like The Woman in the Window. I thought it might end up disappointing me like The Girl on the Train did, another novel about an “unreliable” narrator; however, I was pleased to find that I enjoyed The Woman in the Window and it kept me guessing until the end, unlike The Girl on the Train which I very disappointingly figured out the whodunnit not even half way through reading.

The Woman in the Window is about a child psychologist named Anna Fox who has suffered some sort of trauma that is continually hinted at throughout the novel and that has caused her to become an agoraphobe. She lives alone in her New York City home with her cat*; her husband and daughter are elsewhere. She spends most of her time drinking merlot, not taking her medication properly and watching classic films. In fact, the basic premise of this novel is based on the Hitchcock film noir Rear Window: Anna, who doesn’t have much contact with people, also spends her time spying on her neighbours (seriously people, close your curtains and blinds when it starts to get dark out). One night she sees one of her neighbours being murdered. Or did she?? The thing is, Anna was blitzed out prescription drugs and a whole lot of merlot when she saw it happen, and the person that she thought was murdered is alive….and is not the person that she thought was murdered.

This novel is really about whether Anna actually saw someone get murdered and is being gaslighted by everyone around her who doesn’t believe her. Or has her drug and alcohol abuse consumed her entire life to the point that she doesn’t know what’s real anymore? Anna is a frustrating narrator. Seriously, there were so many times when I wanted to reach into the novel and slap a bottle/glass of merlot out of her hand. She knows she’s an alcoholic, she knows she’s abusing her prescription drugs, and she knows she has to get her shit together if she wants to prove to everyone that she has not gone off the deep end, but she has a hard time doing it. And that’s the point isn’t it? Some people have a hard time pulling themselves back together after a traumatic experience, so let’s give them the benefit of the doubt if they say that they saw their neighbour be murdered.

I really can’t say anything else about this novel without spoiling it, but I will say that I was not disappointed with how it ended and I did not want to put it down until I finished it.

*SPOILER ALERT:

The cat lives, yay!