{PDF} You Should Have Known

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So I suspect part of my problem with this novel was that it has been marketed as something it simply isn't. There is nothing thrilling here whatsoever. Not that there is anything remotely wrong with this - but if you pick something up because you are in the mood for a thriller, and instead get minutiae and screeds of introspection, which then is accessorised as a thriller cliff hangers plonked down as conversational gambit at the end of the very long chapters then is it any wonder that so many reviewers are talking about their frustrations as readers, rather than what they liked about the book? Which is quite a shame really, because Jean Hanff Korelitz can certainly write, certainly has insights to offer, and I personally got a lot out of reading the final quarter of the book. Some have said they felt the ending didn't do it for them, but I am wondering if this is also about the expectations the marketing has set up. But once I had accepted this was not a thriller after all, and that what was on offer was a story of aftermath and an albeit very, very slow emotional transition I stopped skimming and was hooked. Because up until then, I don't think there was ever any sense that anything that was happening to Grace was in any way about 'fucking with her' as it were, but more that she and Henry were unfortunate collateral damage. Indeed, the explanation offered in the letter that events had got out of hand while trying to protect them seemed far more tragically plausible. Mar 30, Bkwmlee rated it liked it Shelves: fiction. In addition to living among the upper echelons of New York high society, Grace also has a forthcoming book that is the culmination of her career experience and quite possibly could make her one of the most sought after therapists in the city. But the physical turmoil that she goes through pales in comparisons to the turmoil in her mind and in her heart, and soon, the question becomes whether she will be able to maintain her sanity and rebuild her life. The first two-thirds of the book felt really slow and dragged out, mostly because the story would go off on various tangents every few pages, to the point that one simple scene could take an entire chapter to play out. Interestingly enough, in the last third or so of the book, the style seemed to shift in that the story went from slow and drawn out to very fast-paced, with one thing happening after another — it was almost as if the last third of the book was written by someone else entirely and not the same person who wrote the first two-thirds. Character development-wise, I actually felt the author did a good job with the main character Grace in that, by letting us the readers into her mind and making us experience first-hand the mental and psychological breakdown that she endures as the result of her carefully-manufactured world collapsing around her, it presented an interesting, thought-provoking commentary about relationships as well as human behavior. Tying the book back to the TV series adaptation mentioned at the beginning of this review — in reading what is out there so far about the series, one thing I found interesting is that there seem to be characters in the series that were not actually in the book. Also, in addition to Nicole Kidman taking on the role of Grace Sachs, they also cast Hugh Grant in the role of her husband Jonathan — this is significant because in the book, Jonathan is a character that is only talked about but never actually appears…yet in the series, it seems that Jonathan as a character will have more of a presence than he did in the book. Overall, I feel this book is highly readable, but for the right audience. It does give some interesting insight on relationships, but I think the length of the book and the convoluted way it was written will probably deter some folks from picking this one up. I was actually tempted to abandon this one myself during the parts that I felt were especially slow, but of course I continued with it and it does pick up pace near the end. View 1 comment. Mar 21, Jennifer rated it it was ok. I should have known after the second page that this book was over- written and under-edited. The description of Grace's office knocked this insomniac out. Seriously - better than Ambien. Yet I'd seen so many good reviews I thought I'd stick with it. And here's the thing - it's a good story. But mired in ridiculous details. You don't have to mention Birkin bags ad nauseum - and Grace's nestled in it's protective bag - to let us know she's privileged and around others even more wildly so than she. We got it. Mistakes bug me in a published book that has allegedly gone thru editing and proofing and this one had a gigantic glaring one. Or maybe I misread - not going to re-read to confirm. But wasn't the big dinner at her father's on Friday nights? She goes without Jonathan and then the cops come. Shocked by the news, she starts the next day canceling her appointments for Friday. And taking the kid to school. But it's Saturday, right? It would have taken much more creativity to lose the endless descriptions of wealth and maybe make Grace middle class. Now that requires some thought. But the real kicker was throwing in the love interest at the end. Just too much. View all 7 comments. Grace Sachs is living the perfect life. She is lucky enough to live in Manhattan in the apartment she grew up in with her husband Jonathan, a pediatric Oncologist at Memorial and her well behaved and musically gifted son Henry. She is on her son's private school fund raising committee and mixes with some of New York's wealthier people. She has her own business as a psychotherapist specialising in counselling couples and is on the verge of publishing a book on the insights she has gleaned from co Grace Sachs is living the perfect life. She has her own business as a psychotherapist specialising in counselling couples and is on the verge of publishing a book on the insights she has gleaned from couples relationship. Titled "You Should Have Known" it puts forward the theory that people whose marriages don't work out have often ignored the early signs that something about their partner is wrong for them before committing to a relationship. So life is rosy for Grace with pre-publication photo shoots and interviews This is a well written novel and the characters of Grace and Henry are well done. Grace is someone I liked and could feel sorry for as her husband was a real master of pulling the wool over her eyes and keeping her in the dark. However, Jonathan himself is largely missing from the novel as a character well as literally and so is any suspense element to the novel. The first half of the book setting up the collapse of Grace's world was very good, but I was then expecting more of the details of what had happened to cause Jonathan to do what he did and disappear but this didn't happen and the middle of the book feeling somewhat flat with Grace removing herself and Henry from New York and only late in the piece finding out some truths about Jonathan. It was an enjoyable read about relationships and how we can fool ourselves but not really a thriller. View all 3 comments. Feb 04, Nicole Overmoyer rated it really liked it. On the one hand, I absolutely didn't want to stop reading because I needed to know how things would turn out for marriage counselor Grace Reinhart Sachs. On the other hand, I absolutely loathed Grace Reinhart Sachs for about three-quarters of the book. This left me very confused as to why I cared what happened to her. Or maybe not so much confused, but guilty that I s There are a lot of things about You Should Have Known by Jean Hanff Korelitz that leave the reader, or maybe just me, conflicted. Or maybe not so much confused, but guilty that I spent a long time hoping her perfect world would implode in on itself. I don't know if Hanff Korelitz intended for a reader to be against the main character in this book, but I was. Allow me to try and explain why I think I didn't like her. She's a rich woman, but not quite rich enough to never consider going on such a show. She's very much about keeping up with the Joneses, as it were. She clings for dear life to the things from her childhood, like the apartment she grew up in and now lives in with her husband and her son and the alumnae spot her son has at a ritzy private school. It's sweet, to a point. Of course, as any good RHNY cast member would do, she strives for more. Grace is a marriage counselor who wrote a book that nine people out of ten find aggressively judgmental. The gist of her book is basically that women should know better than to marry cheaters, abusers, gay men, etc. She says there is no such thing as love at first sight. She says that women should always be aware of their relationships and recognize that they might not know everything that's going on, much less approve of it. Guess who should be the first person in line for a copy of this sage advice? That's right - Grace herself. She admits she fell in love at first sight, never to her clients and only occasionally to herself, but that's only the tip of the iceberg. Her husband, a pediatric oncologist - and she does love to tell people that he's a pediatric oncologist no matter how many times the words on the page say that she doesn't - isn't all he's cracked up to be. The iceberg, in other words, is huge. If Grace were the Titanic, her husband is the iceberg. It's a slow collapse and every new revelation is like another block of ice chipping off or another pump room on the ship filling with water. So why was I rooting against Grace, and I did so quite vociferously, when I should have been hoping for a survivor in the whole mess? I've been thinking about this a lot since I finished the book a few days ago and the best I can come up with is this: I'm not an Upper East Side - and I'm fairly certain that's the geography that Grace liked to talk about - New Yorker. It seems like a microcosm environment with a culture all it's own. And I don't get that culture. Maybe even more than that, I was put off by what she wrote in her book. I'm one of the people I include in the nine out of ten who found it aggressively judgmental. It made me not like her, to tell the truth. When both of those things combined, I read the story to see someone I didn't like get what was coming to them. I'm happy with the ending, though, actually very happy. Grace found out there was a very satisfactory world beyond her little New York bubble - she even discovered to her delight and dismay! All things considered, I really did like this book. It made got me riled up. I felt strongly about things in it. And I couldn't stop reading it. This review will be cross-posted on my blog - link on my profile page. I received a copy of this book through the Goodreads First Reads giveaways. View all 4 comments. Apr 12, Carol rated it did not like it Shelves: book-club. The book starts slowly and then hits the brakes. We know before we start the book that all is not as it seems in Grace Sachs' world. But trying to ride along while she susses it out is excruciating in overlong passages that never seem to end, as this books is at least pages too long. Speaking of long passages, there are long passages about everything. Everything from cashmere twinsets to cigarette smoking is broken down in laborious detail. We spend all this time in Grace's point of view for The book starts slowly and then hits the brakes. We spend all this time in Grace's point of view for no apparent reason. When Korelitz writes about Malaga the main mystery here it is in parts. She is pieces, breasts and weight. We are handed the bleak Grace as a complex person. But Malaga is big breasts and a lot of sex appeal. She is the pivot point of the story but all we need to know is that men circled around her. We know more about some of the minor character's handbags than we do Malaga. It's off- putting. Unfortunately, the same thing is true of the story itself. Beyond the fact that it unfolds without a shred of mystery or surprise, it is slowly, often excruciatingly told. Perhaps the intent was to show a life coming apart detail by detail. But the effect is maddening. A cellphone rings at a crucial moment and we are treated to paragraphs of the contents of Grace's purse as she gropes for it. We are given details about a completely irrelevant dish of Chicken Marbella that Grace brings to a gathering. We wait — and wait — for Grace to open a crucial letter. We watch her replay the details of her life twice, from two different points of view. There is also a lot of details of back ground characters, but barely anything about the husband or several others who should be considered lead characters. I know more about the spouse of the violin teacher than I do the husband. Too many of the characters are "missing" characters, just shadows in which no one interacts. Her husband, Jonathan, is the catalyst behind the entire story for Grace and their son, Henry, yet we never hear from him in this tale. He is off screen so to speak. We gain no insight into his thinking nor do we have one interaction between him and Grace. Grace is the only mother at her son's school who isn't a vacuous snob, and we get plenty of opportunities to come to that realization. Her son has no faults, and may be the first 12 year old to immediately be accepted by other 12 year olds and flourish at a new school the very first day. The in-laws, villains at first, in an instant become the Cleavers, accepting her into their family without hesitation, after 20 years of no contact at all. It's okay that Grace's father cheated repeatedly on her mother, although we hate her husband for cheating on her. Her evil step-mother turns out to be a sweetheart; it was all a misunderstanding over some dishes. And perhaps the most disappointing of all, our heroine finds love within just a few months of fleeing her nightmare in NYC. At first he seems to be a local yokel, but wait, no, he's a college professor. So he is acceptable after all. He finds her adolescent son "wonderful" as everyone does and the son warms up to him instantly and forgets the father just as instantly. The only suspense in this book: would she end up in the arms of the lake neighbor, or the arms of the police detective. But the detective has a double chin, so we know it has to be the lake neighbor. Yipes, what fortitude I have sometimes. My book club tore this book to shreds. However, I must say we had so much fun doing it, that I guess I'm glad I finished it after all. Dec 26, Carol rated it really liked it Shelves: owned-book. Grace Sachs is happily married and a successful therapist with a newly published book when she is shocked to discover terrible revelations about her husband of 20 years. The novel recounts her extreme emotion as she comes to terms with this realization and is forced to gradually sever one life and create another for her child and herself. The novel is very well-written but somewhat tedious with details and too much inner dialogue to satisfy my preference for a stripped down writing style. It was still a very compelling story and I plan to seek out other novels by this author. The new series will star Nicole Kidman and I look forward to checking it out. View 2 comments. Nov 07, Bam cooks the books ;- rated it really liked it Shelves: reads , mystery , library-book , national-literary-festival-smc. Grace Reinhart Sachs is living the perfect life: she is a successful marriage counselor about to publish her first book of relationship advice entitled You Should Have Known; she has been married to Jonathan, a handsome pediatric oncologist and the love of her life, for 20 years; and they have a talented twelve-year-old son, Henry, who attends an expensive private school. But in a blink of an eye that life begins to unravel and it all begins with the brutal murder of a young woman, the mother of Grace Reinhart Sachs is living the perfect life: she is a successful marriage counselor about to publish her first book of relationship advice entitled You Should Have Known; she has been married to Jonathan, a handsome pediatric oncologist and the love of her life, for 20 years; and they have a talented twelve-year-old son, Henry, who attends an expensive private school. But in a blink of an eye that life begins to unravel and it all begins with the brutal murder of a young woman, the mother of one of Henry's schoolmates. Is Grace's somewhat snarky marriage advice coming back to bite her? Should she have known? Deciding to tell the story in third person perspective but entirely through Grace's experiences enhances the feeling of confusion about what is really going on. We never actually meet Jonathan throughout the book. Who is he really? Strangely parts of this novel are compulsive reading while other parts tend to drag. And maddeningly, Grace seems to try to avoid as much of the painful truth as she can. But overall I thought the book was so interesting and well worth reading, exploring how well we can ever really know another person, especially if their intention is to deceive. Mar 04, Carol rated it really liked it. Grace Reinhart Sachs has got it all. The trendy New York apartment, a son enrolled in the best private school, an oncologist husband who specializes in pediatrics; the perfect marriage, the perfect life. In her own right, Grace, a couple's therapist, is the author of a book soon to be published called You Should Have Known. It's the book for all her clients suffering the demise of their partnerships. If they had only noted the early signs, they would have known their marriages were destined for Grace Reinhart Sachs has got it all. If they had only noted the early signs, they would have known their marriages were destined for failure. Things are going so well that I'm beginning to think, nice but so what? Without warning the proverbial you know what hits the fan and all goes south, plunging Grace into a reality she could not have imagined. To tell you more would ruin this beautifully constructed psychological study of a marriage. Jun 04, Karin Slaughter rated it really liked it. Yeah, you should've known. I wish there had been more details about the murder. Sure, the narrator didn't want to know the lurid details, but I sure did! Mar 19, Ellie rated it really liked it Shelves: indchalnge , fiction , nyc. I totally loved it-I read it in one sitting. It was actually addictive. It's sort of a mystery in which the both the crime and the criminal are already known. The biggest problem is that it's somewhat facile, with story ends wrapped up too neatly, at least for me. But that may be that I'm missing the point. In some ways, the book is a contemporary romance, with the conventions You Should Have Known by Jean Hanff Korelitz I bought this book on impulse after reading a review that sounded interesting. In some ways, the book is a contemporary romance, with the conventions stood on their head but still standing and, more to the point, operating and dictating the action. So this creates an odd tension between surface reality and the laws almost of a dream state. But this is a small quibble when considering the amount of pleasure this book gave me. The book is filled with very enjoyable views of the private school parent set and the social gradations therein. It is also interesting for its discussion of our heroine Grace's book-about to be launched into the world-with the provocative title, "You Should Have Known" and its premise that most women coming into couples counseling to save their marriage knew or should have known the devastating truth about their partner be it his contempt for her, for women, his gambling, his drinking, his true sexual orientation, whatever is now destroying their marriage at the very beginning of their relationship but chose to "unsee" it. Somehow facing this will help keep them from repeating their mistakes. Even more importantly, Grace hopes readers women will read this and not make the fatal mistake to begin with. Paul Muldoon. The New York Times. Charity Shumway. July 17, The Dead, Kirkus Reviews. May 20, The Mystery Reader. Archived from the original on Retrieved The Boston Globe. Archived from the original on March 28, The Choice Blog. Entertainment Weekly. Huffington Post. The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved 20 January After Grace left Henry at school the following day, her friend Sylvia warned Grace that she needed to take Henry and leave the city until all of the frenzy about Jonathan and his alleged murder of Malaga died down. Grace took Henry to the summer house she owned in Connecticut. Once Henry was back in school, Grace allowed herself to fall apart. She did not believe that she would ever work as a counselor again. Grace believed that because she had made mistakes, no one would want her to advise them how to fix their marriages. Grace began to renew her confidence in herself when she reunited with her childhood friend, Vita. Vita told Grace that the advice she gave in her book was still advice that women needed to hear. Grace next heard from her agent at the publishing company who told Grace that they still wanted to publish the book and thought it might even reach more women after what had happened with Jonathan. It turned out that Jonathan had not told Grace that he had a younger brother, Aaron, of whom Jonathan had been accused of playing some role in his death. Despite the tragedy that Jonathan had caused them, Mitchell and his parents decided turn the situation around by taking in the girl. He explained one of the boys had gotten into trouble because he had picked the wrong friends, but that the boy was a good kid and the family deserved any help it could get. Grace noted the similarities in the situation and agreed to give the family whatever they needed. Read more from the Study Guide. Browse all BookRags Study Guides. All rights reserved. Toggle navigation. Sign Up. Sign In. View the Study Pack. Plot Summary. You Should Have Known - Part 2: Chapters 9 - 12 Summary & Analysis

To top it off, Jonathan, Grace's husband disappears. With officer's knocking at the door, Grace finally takes a hard, long look in the mirror and sees she knows nothing or what she should have known. Initially, I was on board with this novel. Korelitz had me eating out of her hand. I had to know more about the fall of this woman I never really came to like. After reading page after page of elusive, mysterious, and suggestive verbiage that just didn't give anything, I realized I didn't care anymore. Who cares who, where, or what the hell type of psychopath Jonathan is? Amidst some well written passages is a storyline I felt couldn't stand up to my expectations anymore. The idea that it's suspenseful failed, but I hung in there. Some sort of sinister reveal was hoped for, but it never comes to fruition. I just wish I would have known that after I'd spend more than a week on this novel, I would have feel so empty. Then again I did ignore all the signs. Shame on me. All is not lost with this novel. I feel that maybe if I'd expected it to be more chick-litish as opposed to a true nail-biter I could have appreciated more. And there are moments when I could see that Jean Hanff Korelitz is actually a pretty good writer. It's just buried under a lot of nothing. View all 21 comments. Jul 23, Jane rated it really liked it. On one hand, I found this book incredibly compelling. I had to restrain myself to read every line. I can't tell if it is because the plot was better than the writing or if I just had too much caffeine, the night I stayed up until 2 AM to finish this book! This reminded me of an old-fashioned roller coaster: It starts with a pleasant ride - great characters and interactions. Then the suspense builds and builds and you come cras On one hand, I found this book incredibly compelling. Then the suspense builds and builds and you come crashing down. Very exciting. Then the last section - a large part of the book - is a glide to an extremely predictable conclusion. View all 14 comments. Mar 13, Elyse Walters rated it it was amazing. I already wrote a review lost it , Don't you hate that??? I'll need to forgive myself for getting a little sloppy on this one. I also read other Goodread reviews I understand comments readers who gave less than 4 stars. I saw flaws in this book. YET: Its a worthy book to read! The story is 'very interesting' much of the time. A few slow parts --yet --I sure as hell wanted to know 'what was coming next'. I've been married for 35 years. I've an interest in relationships working. I'v I already wrote a review lost it , Don't you hate that??? I've an interest in 'taking responsibility for relationships working Sometimes I succeed -other times I have failed. It sure can anyway!!!! I like books which do this. It allows for 'thinking' and more thinking I'll suggest this book to others-- I'd love to read this author again -- I'm thankful to have won this book as a 'first-reads'-- "You Should Have Known"--[And Sometimes, you just never know] People keep sending me little notices Not sure where the review is View all 5 comments. Mar 29, Lara Song rated it did not like it. It took me over a week to force myself to finish this. I knew I was going to give a bad review. I felt it was necessary to finish before judging. Third person POV was actually first person. You know those people that take an hour to tell a story because they have trouble focusing? To top it off, the crap the narrator speaks of is absurdly boring and contributes nothing to the story. The story It took me over a week to force myself to finish this. The story is predictable. The time line is completely out of whack in the third section. She speaks of events in past and present in the same sentence. It's very frustrating. Grace should have been the murder victim. People as stupid as her deserve what they get. It was unbelievably unrealistic. There was zero character development. The minimal dialogue throughout the story was pointless. The narrator conveys important details by completely avoiding the situation or rather, speaking in circles. This novel should be read by anyone who wants to write. It covers every item on the do not do list. Show, don't tell. And please, don't ramble. View all 6 comments. Jun 02, Shannon rated it did not like it Shelves: bea , realistic-fiction , arc-galley , abandoned. This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here. I usually don't comment on books I abandon, but I'm making an exception. I wanted to love this book. I love the idea of a therapist writing a blunt relationship advice book. Setting up that premise took 28 pages. The next 70 were about planning and attending a fundraising party. Nothing of note happened for pages. My biggest issue was the adult-gossip-girl voice the narrator has. It's hard for me to read a book when I hate the main character but not impossible. See: Close My Eyes. Grace spen I usually don't comment on books I abandon, but I'm making an exception. And hers is ONLY leather. Again, this is bag that costs 2 months gross salary for me. And then there was the incident where after dropping of her son for a party, the hostess said that the doorman could hail a cab for Grace. Grace then felt "a queasy feeling, like a twister-tossed girl from Kansas emerging into unreal Technicolor". The hostess didn't know Grace has lived in upper-crust New York her entire life. She had a doorman too! Did this mom think Grace was less than fabulously wealthy?? I had to stop when Grace and Co's reaction to a woman's murder wasn't sympathy for the woman's children and family, it was scrambling to distance this woman from their perfect private school. They decided that since the deceased's son attended on a scholarship, he wasn't a full student. Their reputation was kept intact. Because that's what mattered most. View all 13 comments. Feb 27, switterbug Betsey rated it really liked it. She identifies the red flags that one should detect when hooking up with a lifetime partner. Fortunately for Grace, she has had 17 happily married years with Jonathan, a compassionate pediatric oncologist. Until one day, her life turns upside down. Grace's book is on the verge of being published; already she has had interviews with different magazines and TV news shows. Jonathan is supportive, her practice thrives, and their twelve-year-old son, Henry, is a bright student at a private, prestigious middle school. They live in the New York apartment that Grace grew up in. Their lives are content and balanced. And, then, a tragedy throws Grace into the teeth of an emotional storm. Her life has convulsed, her world is tilted, her compass is in uncharted territory, and misaligned. She has only herself, her comfort zones special places in NY that she has known since childhood, a rural farmhouse in Connecticut, eateries she frequents , and her beloved son. Now, she thinks, who should have known? Most of her friends have withdrawn, or feel awkward to help. Some have gossipy curiosities. We are taken on a journey of her past, including the details of how she revisits her memories. Grace begins to question the truth of her perceptions, which produces a chronicle of retrospection. The journey thrusts her into accepting new disclosures from her childhood past, and questioning all she holds dear now. And what do I not know? Whatever she knew, could verify, could comprehend-- that thing could remain in situ, at least for now. Anything that could not be witnessed or vouched for she would leave in the open, an isolated artifact to return to when her strength returned Korelitz rendered a full life that turned into something savage and messy. I expected hope and redemption, yes, but not a wholesale and facile conclusion. That is why I knocked it down a star and gave it 4. But this may not bother all readers. In any case, the prose, structure, and characters were superlative. View all 16 comments. This is a hard one to quantify. For the first third I was teetering between 1 and 2 stars. While there is nothing wrong with having a main character who starts out as exceedingly shallow, signs of growth need to be showing much earlier on. But with Grace, there was almost no sign of hope. There was just no internal landscape or emotional scope - other than one-note self-pity. Unless you are deeply interested in what it is to be a smug, judgemental New York City private school mom with an all too This is a hard one to quantify. Unless you are deeply interested in what it is to be a smug, judgemental New York City private school mom with an all too predictable handbag fetish you may feel you have unwittingly wandered into a bit of a losing game here. The were only really two people in the novel I wanted to know about, and one was dead, and the other on the run for her murder. And yet, there really is a lot of good stuff going on here. It is a great concept, and could really have been a corker of a thriller, but reading it, I just didn't take away any sense at all that the author wanted to be writing a thriller, or indeed set out to do so. She likes detail, and is not remotely interested in plot. In fact, almost all the 'plot' bits are delivered after-the-fact, with the main character ruminating on events the reader wasn't actually even present for. So I suspect part of my problem with this novel was that it has been marketed as something it simply isn't. There is nothing thrilling here whatsoever. Not that there is anything remotely wrong with this - but if you pick something up because you are in the mood for a thriller, and instead get minutiae and screeds of introspection, which then is accessorised as a thriller cliff hangers plonked down as conversational gambit at the end of the very long chapters then is it any wonder that so many reviewers are talking about their frustrations as readers, rather than what they liked about the book? Which is quite a shame really, because Jean Hanff Korelitz can certainly write, certainly has insights to offer, and I personally got a lot out of reading the final quarter of the book. Some have said they felt the ending didn't do it for them, but I am wondering if this is also about the expectations the marketing has set up. But once I had accepted this was not a thriller after all, and that what was on offer was a story of aftermath and an albeit very, very slow emotional transition I stopped skimming and was hooked. Because up until then, I don't think there was ever any sense that anything that was happening to Grace was in any way about 'fucking with her' as it were, but more that she and Henry were unfortunate collateral damage. Indeed, the explanation offered in the letter that events had got out of hand while trying to protect them seemed far more tragically plausible. Mar 30, Bkwmlee rated it liked it Shelves: fiction. In addition to living among the upper echelons of New York high society, Grace also has a forthcoming book that is the culmination of her career experience and quite possibly could make her one of the most sought after therapists in the city. But the physical turmoil that she goes through pales in comparisons to the turmoil in her mind and in her heart, and soon, the question becomes whether she will be able to maintain her sanity and rebuild her life. The first two-thirds of the book felt really slow and dragged out, mostly because the story would go off on various tangents every few pages, to the point that one simple scene could take an entire chapter to play out. Interestingly enough, in the last third or so of the book, the style seemed to shift in that the story went from slow and drawn out to very fast-paced, with one thing happening after another — it was almost as if the last third of the book was written by someone else entirely and not the same person who wrote the first two-thirds. Character development-wise, I actually felt the author did a good job with the main character Grace in that, by letting us the readers into her mind and making us experience first-hand the mental and psychological breakdown that she endures as the result of her carefully-manufactured world collapsing around her, it presented an interesting, thought-provoking commentary about relationships as well as human behavior. Tying the book back to the TV series adaptation mentioned at the beginning of this review — in reading what is out there so far about the series, one thing I found interesting is that there seem to be characters in the series that were not actually in the book. Also, in addition to Nicole Kidman taking on the role of Grace Sachs, they also cast Hugh Grant in the role of her husband Jonathan — this is significant because in the book, Jonathan is a character that is only talked about but never actually appears…yet in the series, it seems that Jonathan as a character will have more of a presence than he did in the book. Overall, I feel this book is highly readable, but for the right audience. It does give some interesting insight on relationships, but I think the length of the book and the convoluted way it was written will probably deter some folks from picking this one up. I was actually tempted to abandon this one myself during the parts that I felt were especially slow, but of course I continued with it and it does pick up pace near the end. View 1 comment. Mar 21, Jennifer rated it it was ok. I should have known after the second page that this book was over-written and under-edited. The description of Grace's office knocked this insomniac out. Seriously - better than Ambien. Yet I'd seen so many good reviews I thought I'd stick with it. And here's the thing - it's a good story. But mired in ridiculous details. You don't have to mention Birkin bags ad nauseum - and Grace's nestled in it's protective bag - to let us know she's privileged and around others even more wildly so than she. We got it. Mistakes bug me in a published book that has allegedly gone thru editing and proofing and this one had a gigantic glaring one. Or maybe I misread - not going to re-read to confirm. But wasn't the big dinner at her father's on Friday nights? She goes without Jonathan and then the cops come. Shocked by the news, she starts the next day canceling her appointments for Friday. And taking the kid to school. But it's Saturday, right? It would have taken much more creativity to lose the endless descriptions of wealth and maybe make Grace middle class. Now that requires some thought. But the real kicker was throwing in the love interest at the end. Just too much. View all 7 comments. Grace Sachs is living the perfect life. She is lucky enough to live in Manhattan in the apartment she grew up in with her husband Jonathan, a pediatric Oncologist at Memorial and her well behaved and musically gifted son Henry. She is on her son's private school fund raising committee and mixes with some of New York's wealthier people. She has her own business as a psychotherapist specialising in counselling couples and is on the verge of publishing a book on the insights she has gleaned from co Grace Sachs is living the perfect life. She has her own business as a psychotherapist specialising in counselling couples and is on the verge of publishing a book on the insights she has gleaned from couples relationship. Titled "You Should Have Known" it puts forward the theory that people whose marriages don't work out have often ignored the early signs that something about their partner is wrong for them before committing to a relationship. So life is rosy for Grace with pre-publication photo shoots and interviews This is a well written novel and the characters of Grace and Henry are well done. Grace is someone I liked and could feel sorry for as her husband was a real master of pulling the wool over her eyes and keeping her in the dark. However, Jonathan himself is largely missing from the novel as a character well as literally and so is any suspense element to the novel. The first half of the book setting up the collapse of Grace's world was very good, but I was then expecting more of the details of what had happened to cause Jonathan to do what he did and disappear but this didn't happen and the middle of the book feeling somewhat flat with Grace removing herself and Henry from New York and only late in the piece finding out some truths about Jonathan. It was an enjoyable read about relationships and how we can fool ourselves but not really a thriller. View all 3 comments. Feb 04, Nicole Overmoyer rated it really liked it. On the one hand, I absolutely didn't want to stop reading because I needed to know how things would turn out for marriage counselor Grace Reinhart Sachs. On the other hand, I absolutely loathed Grace Reinhart Sachs for about three-quarters of the book. This left me very confused as to why I cared what happened to her. Or maybe not so much confused, but guilty that I s There are a lot of things about You Should Have Known by Jean Hanff Korelitz that leave the reader, or maybe just me, conflicted. Or maybe not so much confused, but guilty that I spent a long time hoping her perfect world would implode in on itself. I don't know if Hanff Korelitz intended for a reader to be against the main character in this book, but I was. Allow me to try and explain why I think I didn't like her. She's a rich woman, but not quite rich enough to never consider going on such a show. She's very much about keeping up with the Joneses, as it were. She clings for dear life to the things from her childhood, like the apartment she grew up in and now lives in with her husband and her son and the alumnae spot her son has at a ritzy private school. It's sweet, to a point. Of course, as any good RHNY cast member would do, she strives for more. Grace is a marriage counselor who wrote a book that nine people out of ten find aggressively judgmental. The gist of her book is basically that women should know better than to marry cheaters, abusers, gay men, etc. She says there is no such thing as love at first sight. She says that women should always be aware of their relationships and recognize that they might not know everything that's going on, much less approve of it. Guess who should be the first person in line for a copy of this sage advice? That's right - Grace herself. She admits she fell in love at first sight, never to her clients and only occasionally to herself, but that's only the tip of the iceberg. Her husband, a pediatric oncologist - and she does love to tell people that he's a pediatric oncologist no matter how many times the words on the page say that she doesn't - isn't all he's cracked up to be. The iceberg, in other words, is huge. If Grace were the Titanic, her husband is the iceberg. It's a slow collapse and every new revelation is like another block of ice chipping off or another pump room on the ship filling with water. So why was I rooting against Grace, and I did so quite vociferously, when I should have been hoping for a survivor in the whole mess? I've been thinking about this a lot since I finished the book a few days ago and the best I can come up with is this: I'm not an Upper East Side - and I'm fairly certain that's the geography that Grace liked to talk about - New Yorker. It seems like a microcosm environment with a culture all it's own. And I don't get that culture. Maybe even more than that, I was put off by what she wrote in her book. I'm one of the people I include in the nine out of ten who found it aggressively judgmental. It made me not like her, to tell the truth. When both of those things combined, I read the story to see someone I didn't like get what was coming to them. I'm happy with the ending, though, actually very happy. Grace found out there was a very satisfactory world beyond her little New York bubble - she even discovered to her delight and dismay! All things considered, I really did like this book. It made got me riled up. I felt strongly about things in it. And I couldn't stop reading it. This review will be cross-posted on my blog - link on my profile page. I received a copy of this book through the Goodreads First Reads giveaways. View all 4 comments. Apr 12, Carol rated it did not like it Shelves: book-club. The book starts slowly and then hits the brakes. We know before we start the book that all is not as it seems in Grace Sachs' world. But trying to ride along while she susses it out is excruciating in overlong passages that never seem to end, as this books is at least pages too long. Speaking of long passages, there are long passages about everything. Everything from cashmere twinsets to cigarette smoking is broken down in laborious detail. We spend all this time in Grace's point of view for The book starts slowly and then hits the brakes. We spend all this time in Grace's point of view for no apparent reason. When Korelitz writes about Malaga the main mystery here it is in parts. She is pieces, breasts and weight. We are handed the bleak Grace as a complex person. But Malaga is big breasts and a lot of sex appeal. She is the pivot point of the story but all we need to know is that men circled around her. We know more about some of the minor character's handbags than we do Malaga. It's off-putting. Unfortunately, the same thing is true of the story itself. Beyond the fact that it unfolds without a shred of mystery or surprise, it is slowly, often excruciatingly told. Perhaps the intent was to show a life coming apart detail by detail. But the effect is maddening. A cellphone rings at a crucial moment and we are treated to paragraphs of the contents of Grace's purse as she gropes for it. We are given details about a completely irrelevant dish of Chicken Marbella that Grace brings to a gathering. We wait — and wait — for Grace to open a crucial letter. We watch her replay the details of her life twice, from two different points of view. There is also a lot of details of back ground characters, but barely anything about the husband or several others who should be considered lead characters. I know more about the spouse of the violin teacher than I do the husband. Too many of the characters are "missing" characters, just shadows in which no one interacts. Her husband, Jonathan, is the catalyst behind the entire story for Grace and their son, Henry, yet we never hear from him in this tale. He is off screen so to speak. We gain no insight into his thinking nor do we have one interaction between him and Grace. Grace is the only mother at her son's school who isn't a vacuous snob, and we get plenty of opportunities to come to that realization. Her son has no faults, and may be the first 12 year old to immediately be accepted by other 12 year olds and flourish at a new school the very first day. The in-laws, villains at first, in an instant become the Cleavers, accepting her into their family without hesitation, after 20 years of no contact at all. It's okay that Grace's father cheated repeatedly on her mother, although we hate her husband for cheating on her. Her evil step-mother turns out to be a sweetheart; it was all a misunderstanding over some dishes. And perhaps the most disappointing of all, our heroine finds love within just a few months of fleeing her nightmare in NYC. At first he seems to be a local yokel, but wait, no, he's a college professor. So he is acceptable after all. He finds her adolescent son "wonderful" as everyone does and the son warms up to him instantly and forgets the father just as instantly. The only suspense in this book: would she end up in the arms of the lake neighbor, or the arms of the police detective. But the detective has a double chin, so we know it has to be the lake neighbor. Yipes, what fortitude I have sometimes. My book club tore this book to shreds. However, I must say we had so much fun doing it, that I guess I'm glad I finished it after all. Dec 26, Carol rated it really liked it Shelves: owned-book. Grace Sachs is happily married and a successful therapist with a newly published book when she is shocked to discover terrible revelations about her husband of 20 years. The novel recounts her extreme emotion as she comes to terms with this realization and is forced to gradually sever one life and create another for her child and herself. The novel is very well-written but somewhat tedious with details and too much inner dialogue to satisfy my preference for a stripped down writing style. Posted by ambidexteri. The last time I did that, the chosen book sucked, but this one sounded promising. From the back:. Grace Reinhart Sachs is living the only life she ever wanted for herself. Devoted to her husband, a pediatric oncologist at a major cancer hospital, their young son Henry, and the patients she sees in her therapy practice, her days are full of familiar things: She lives in the very New York apartment in which she was raised, and sends Henry to the school she herself once attended. Dismayed by the ways in which women delude themselves, Grace is also the author of a book You Should Have Known, in which she cautions women to really hear what men are trying to tell them. But weeks before the book is published a chasm opens in her own life: A violent death, a missing husband, and, in the place of a man Grace thought she knew, only an ongoing chain of terrible revelations. Left behind in the wake of a spreading and very public disaster, and horrified by the ways in which she has failed to heed her own advice, Grace must dismantle one life and create another for her child and herself. I simply loved this book. It was one of those books that you get addicted to. Grace is a wonderful character. You just should have known. But the book is just one part of her life. The thing I loved most about the book is how internal it is. Her memories, combined with her knowledge of the human mind, makes her inner journey engaging and exciting. Speaking of the murder, the solving of it is also perfectly timed. I cannot get over how interesting and smart it is that a psychologist who wrote a book on pinpointing flaws early on ends up marrying a legitimate psychopath… and not realizing it for 17 years. As she figures out the truth about Jonathan and her life with him, she is forced to do some serious, painful soul-searching. Do not pass Go. Posted on April 3, , in Uncategorized. Bookmark the permalink. Leave a comment. YOU SHOULD HAVE KNOWN | Kirkus Reviews

She was shocked when the co-worker indicated Jonathan was no longer an employee there. Later that evening, Grace was interviewed by police again. She began to understand more about what the police believed her husband had done. At home, she searched the house looking for things that did not belong. After Grace left Henry at school the following day, her friend Sylvia warned Grace that she needed to take Henry and leave the city until all of the frenzy about Jonathan and his alleged murder of Malaga died down. Grace took Henry to the summer house she owned in Connecticut. Once Henry was back in school, Grace allowed herself to fall apart. She did not believe that she would ever work as a counselor again. Grace believed that because she had made mistakes, no one would want her to advise them how to fix their marriages. Grace began to renew her confidence in herself when she reunited with her childhood friend, Vita. Vita told Grace that the advice she gave in her book was still advice that women needed to hear. Grace next heard from her agent at the publishing company who told Grace that they still wanted to publish the book and thought it might even reach more women after what had happened with Jonathan. It turned out that Jonathan had not told Grace that he had a younger brother, Aaron, of whom Jonathan had been accused of playing some role in his death. Despite the tragedy that Jonathan had caused them, Mitchell and his parents decided turn the situation around by taking in the girl. He explained one of the boys had gotten into trouble because he had picked the wrong friends, but that the boy was a good kid and the family deserved any help it could get. Grace noted the similarities in the situation and agreed to give the family whatever they needed. Read more from the Study Guide. Browse all BookRags Study Guides. All rights reserved. Toggle navigation. Uh-oh, it looks like your Internet Explorer is out of date. For a better shopping experience, please upgrade now. Javascript is not enabled in your browser. Enabling JavaScript in your browser will allow you to experience all the features of our site. Learn how to enable JavaScript on your browser. NOOK Book. Home 1 Books 2. Add to Wishlist. Sign in to Purchase Instantly. Members save with free shipping everyday! See details. Grace Reinhart Sachs is living the only life she ever wanted for herself. Devoted to her husband, a pediatric oncologist at a major cancer hospital, their young son Henry, and the patients she sees in her therapy practice, her days are full of familiar things: she lives in the very New York apartment in which she was raised, and sends Henry to the school she herself once attended. Dismayed by the ways in which women delude themselves, Grace is also the author of a book You Should Have Known , in which she cautions women to really hear what men are trying to tell them. But weeks before the book is published a chasm opens in her own life: a violent death, a missing husband, and, in the place of a man Grace thought she knew, only an ongoing chain of terrible revelations. Published March 25th by Grand Central Publishing. Jean Hanff Korelitz Goodreads Author ,. Christina Delaine narrator. Una famiglia felice Hardcover. Elena Cantoni Translator. You Should Have Known ebook. Published March 1st by Grand Central Publishing. You Should Have Known Paperback. Published September 26th by Grand Central Publishing. You Should Have Known Audiobook. You Should Have Known by Jean Hanff Korelitz, Paperback | Barnes & Noble®

And taking the kid to school. But it's Saturday, right? It would have taken much more creativity to lose the endless descriptions of wealth and maybe make Grace middle class. Now that requires some thought. But the real kicker was throwing in the love interest at the end. Just too much. View all 7 comments. Grace Sachs is living the perfect life. She is lucky enough to live in Manhattan in the apartment she grew up in with her husband Jonathan, a pediatric Oncologist at Memorial and her well behaved and musically gifted son Henry. She is on her son's private school fund raising committee and mixes with some of New York's wealthier people. She has her own business as a psychotherapist specialising in counselling couples and is on the verge of publishing a book on the insights she has gleaned from co Grace Sachs is living the perfect life. She has her own business as a psychotherapist specialising in counselling couples and is on the verge of publishing a book on the insights she has gleaned from couples relationship. Titled "You Should Have Known" it puts forward the theory that people whose marriages don't work out have often ignored the early signs that something about their partner is wrong for them before committing to a relationship. So life is rosy for Grace with pre-publication photo shoots and interviews This is a well written novel and the characters of Grace and Henry are well done. Grace is someone I liked and could feel sorry for as her husband was a real master of pulling the wool over her eyes and keeping her in the dark. However, Jonathan himself is largely missing from the novel as a character well as literally and so is any suspense element to the novel. The first half of the book setting up the collapse of Grace's world was very good, but I was then expecting more of the details of what had happened to cause Jonathan to do what he did and disappear but this didn't happen and the middle of the book feeling somewhat flat with Grace removing herself and Henry from New York and only late in the piece finding out some truths about Jonathan. It was an enjoyable read about relationships and how we can fool ourselves but not really a thriller. View all 3 comments. Feb 04, Nicole Overmoyer rated it really liked it. On the one hand, I absolutely didn't want to stop reading because I needed to know how things would turn out for marriage counselor Grace Reinhart Sachs. On the other hand, I absolutely loathed Grace Reinhart Sachs for about three-quarters of the book. This left me very confused as to why I cared what happened to her. Or maybe not so much confused, but guilty that I s There are a lot of things about You Should Have Known by Jean Hanff Korelitz that leave the reader, or maybe just me, conflicted. Or maybe not so much confused, but guilty that I spent a long time hoping her perfect world would implode in on itself. I don't know if Hanff Korelitz intended for a reader to be against the main character in this book, but I was. Allow me to try and explain why I think I didn't like her. She's a rich woman, but not quite rich enough to never consider going on such a show. She's very much about keeping up with the Joneses, as it were. She clings for dear life to the things from her childhood, like the apartment she grew up in and now lives in with her husband and her son and the alumnae spot her son has at a ritzy private school. It's sweet, to a point. Of course, as any good RHNY cast member would do, she strives for more. Grace is a marriage counselor who wrote a book that nine people out of ten find aggressively judgmental. The gist of her book is basically that women should know better than to marry cheaters, abusers, gay men, etc. She says there is no such thing as love at first sight. She says that women should always be aware of their relationships and recognize that they might not know everything that's going on, much less approve of it. Guess who should be the first person in line for a copy of this sage advice? That's right - Grace herself. She admits she fell in love at first sight, never to her clients and only occasionally to herself, but that's only the tip of the iceberg. Her husband, a pediatric oncologist - and she does love to tell people that he's a pediatric oncologist no matter how many times the words on the page say that she doesn't - isn't all he's cracked up to be. The iceberg, in other words, is huge. If Grace were the Titanic, her husband is the iceberg. It's a slow collapse and every new revelation is like another block of ice chipping off or another pump room on the ship filling with water. So why was I rooting against Grace, and I did so quite vociferously, when I should have been hoping for a survivor in the whole mess? I've been thinking about this a lot since I finished the book a few days ago and the best I can come up with is this: I'm not an Upper East Side - and I'm fairly certain that's the geography that Grace liked to talk about - New Yorker. It seems like a microcosm environment with a culture all it's own. And I don't get that culture. Maybe even more than that, I was put off by what she wrote in her book. I'm one of the people I include in the nine out of ten who found it aggressively judgmental. It made me not like her, to tell the truth. When both of those things combined, I read the story to see someone I didn't like get what was coming to them. I'm happy with the ending, though, actually very happy. Grace found out there was a very satisfactory world beyond her little New York bubble - she even discovered to her delight and dismay! All things considered, I really did like this book. It made got me riled up. I felt strongly about things in it. And I couldn't stop reading it. This review will be cross-posted on my blog - link on my profile page. I received a copy of this book through the Goodreads First Reads giveaways. View all 4 comments. Apr 12, Carol rated it did not like it Shelves: book-club. The book starts slowly and then hits the brakes. We know before we start the book that all is not as it seems in Grace Sachs' world. But trying to ride along while she susses it out is excruciating in overlong passages that never seem to end, as this books is at least pages too long. Speaking of long passages, there are long passages about everything. Everything from cashmere twinsets to cigarette smoking is broken down in laborious detail. We spend all this time in Grace's point of view for The book starts slowly and then hits the brakes. We spend all this time in Grace's point of view for no apparent reason. When Korelitz writes about Malaga the main mystery here it is in parts. She is pieces, breasts and weight. We are handed the bleak Grace as a complex person. But Malaga is big breasts and a lot of sex appeal. She is the pivot point of the story but all we need to know is that men circled around her. We know more about some of the minor character's handbags than we do Malaga. It's off-putting. Unfortunately, the same thing is true of the story itself. Beyond the fact that it unfolds without a shred of mystery or surprise, it is slowly, often excruciatingly told. Perhaps the intent was to show a life coming apart detail by detail. But the effect is maddening. A cellphone rings at a crucial moment and we are treated to paragraphs of the contents of Grace's purse as she gropes for it. We are given details about a completely irrelevant dish of Chicken Marbella that Grace brings to a gathering. We wait — and wait — for Grace to open a crucial letter. We watch her replay the details of her life twice, from two different points of view. There is also a lot of details of back ground characters, but barely anything about the husband or several others who should be considered lead characters. I know more about the spouse of the violin teacher than I do the husband. Too many of the characters are "missing" characters, just shadows in which no one interacts. Her husband, Jonathan, is the catalyst behind the entire story for Grace and their son, Henry, yet we never hear from him in this tale. He is off screen so to speak. We gain no insight into his thinking nor do we have one interaction between him and Grace. Grace is the only mother at her son's school who isn't a vacuous snob, and we get plenty of opportunities to come to that realization. Her son has no faults, and may be the first 12 year old to immediately be accepted by other 12 year olds and flourish at a new school the very first day. The in-laws, villains at first, in an instant become the Cleavers, accepting her into their family without hesitation, after 20 years of no contact at all. It's okay that Grace's father cheated repeatedly on her mother, although we hate her husband for cheating on her. Her evil step-mother turns out to be a sweetheart; it was all a misunderstanding over some dishes. And perhaps the most disappointing of all, our heroine finds love within just a few months of fleeing her nightmare in NYC. At first he seems to be a local yokel, but wait, no, he's a college professor. So he is acceptable after all. He finds her adolescent son "wonderful" as everyone does and the son warms up to him instantly and forgets the father just as instantly. The only suspense in this book: would she end up in the arms of the lake neighbor, or the arms of the police detective. But the detective has a double chin, so we know it has to be the lake neighbor. Yipes, what fortitude I have sometimes. My book club tore this book to shreds. However, I must say we had so much fun doing it, that I guess I'm glad I finished it after all. Dec 26, Carol rated it really liked it Shelves: owned-book. Grace Sachs is happily married and a successful therapist with a newly published book when she is shocked to discover terrible revelations about her husband of 20 years. The novel recounts her extreme emotion as she comes to terms with this realization and is forced to gradually sever one life and create another for her child and herself. The novel is very well-written but somewhat tedious with details and too much inner dialogue to satisfy my preference for a stripped down writing style. It was still a very compelling story and I plan to seek out other novels by this author. The new series will star Nicole Kidman and I look forward to checking it out. View 2 comments. Nov 07, Bam cooks the books ;- rated it really liked it Shelves: reads , mystery , library-book , national-literary-festival-smc. Grace Reinhart Sachs is living the perfect life: she is a successful marriage counselor about to publish her first book of relationship advice entitled You Should Have Known; she has been married to Jonathan, a handsome pediatric oncologist and the love of her life, for 20 years; and they have a talented twelve-year-old son, Henry, who attends an expensive private school. But in a blink of an eye that life begins to unravel and it all begins with the brutal murder of a young woman, the mother of Grace Reinhart Sachs is living the perfect life: she is a successful marriage counselor about to publish her first book of relationship advice entitled You Should Have Known; she has been married to Jonathan, a handsome pediatric oncologist and the love of her life, for 20 years; and they have a talented twelve-year-old son, Henry, who attends an expensive private school. But in a blink of an eye that life begins to unravel and it all begins with the brutal murder of a young woman, the mother of one of Henry's schoolmates. Is Grace's somewhat snarky marriage advice coming back to bite her? Should she have known? Deciding to tell the story in third person perspective but entirely through Grace's experiences enhances the feeling of confusion about what is really going on. We never actually meet Jonathan throughout the book. Who is he really? Strangely parts of this novel are compulsive reading while other parts tend to drag. And maddeningly, Grace seems to try to avoid as much of the painful truth as she can. But overall I thought the book was so interesting and well worth reading, exploring how well we can ever really know another person, especially if their intention is to deceive. Mar 04, Carol rated it really liked it. Grace Reinhart Sachs has got it all. The trendy New York apartment, a son enrolled in the best private school, an oncologist husband who specializes in pediatrics; the perfect marriage, the perfect life. In her own right, Grace, a couple's therapist, is the author of a book soon to be published called You Should Have Known. It's the book for all her clients suffering the demise of their partnerships. If they had only noted the early signs, they would have known their marriages were destined for Grace Reinhart Sachs has got it all. If they had only noted the early signs, they would have known their marriages were destined for failure. Things are going so well that I'm beginning to think, nice but so what? Without warning the proverbial you know what hits the fan and all goes south, plunging Grace into a reality she could not have imagined. To tell you more would ruin this beautifully constructed psychological study of a marriage. Jun 04, Karin Slaughter rated it really liked it. Yeah, you should've known. I wish there had been more details about the murder. Sure, the narrator didn't want to know the lurid details, but I sure did! Mar 19, Ellie rated it really liked it Shelves: indchalnge , fiction , nyc. I totally loved it-I read it in one sitting. It was actually addictive. It's sort of a mystery in which the both the crime and the criminal are already known. The biggest problem is that it's somewhat facile, with story ends wrapped up too neatly, at least for me. But that may be that I'm missing the point. In some ways, the book is a contemporary romance, with the conventions You Should Have Known by Jean Hanff Korelitz I bought this book on impulse after reading a review that sounded interesting. In some ways, the book is a contemporary romance, with the conventions stood on their head but still standing and, more to the point, operating and dictating the action. So this creates an odd tension between surface reality and the laws almost of a dream state. But this is a small quibble when considering the amount of pleasure this book gave me. The book is filled with very enjoyable views of the private school parent set and the social gradations therein. It is also interesting for its discussion of our heroine Grace's book-about to be launched into the world-with the provocative title, "You Should Have Known" and its premise that most women coming into couples counseling to save their marriage knew or should have known the devastating truth about their partner be it his contempt for her, for women, his gambling, his drinking, his true sexual orientation, whatever is now destroying their marriage at the very beginning of their relationship but chose to "unsee" it. Somehow facing this will help keep them from repeating their mistakes. Even more importantly, Grace hopes readers women will read this and not make the fatal mistake to begin with. Of course, the irony is that Grace does not see how this describes her own situation and her seemingly idyllic marriage. Her near-canonization of Jonathan, her husband, becomes somewhat cloying and nearly unbearable and the reader is quickly aware of the oncoming irony. As I said, some of the neat resolutions to complicated situations made this book less than it could have been. But I could not did not want to put it down and escaped into it in a way that has become rare to me as I have become a more mature, possibly sophisticated reader. Even knowing what was going to happen did not destroy the pleasure of this book, this very New York City world with its superficial inhabitants amid which Grace struggles to penetrate her many illusions and, sometimes bravely, often fearfully, finally come to terms if not with reality at the very least with facts. Mar 31, Crystal rated it it was ok Shelves: fiction , novels. Mar 08, Denise rated it it was amazing. The incredible power of this book comes from the voice of its protagonist in an almost stream of consciousness narration that grabs and holds the reader in thrall until the very end. I found myself marking up the pages, highlighting 5 out of 5 stars - "If a woman chooses the wrong person, he was always going to be the wrong person: that was all. I found myself marking up the pages, highlighting the passages that I'll be thinking about for days to come and will long to talk about with fellow bookish friends. Grace Reinhart Sachs had it all -- a flourishing therapy practice focused on relationships with a book about to be published, a loving husband who worked as a pediatric oncologist at Memorial Sloan-Kettering, and an adorable son named Henry. Until the day she didn't To say more about the nature of the plot and the revelations would spoil the read, so I'll just leave this by saying that I'd recommend this to any book club -- though a common tale of "love gone wrong" and certainly one of secrets and lies - it felt new and unique because Grace had to be drug kicking and screaming to the truth. How can anyone be so blind? Well, it's often said that we see what we want and hope to see and "doubt can be a gift. Dec 06, Roxie tokenfemale rated it did not like it Shelves: limp-noodles. Even when chapter six began by saying that "The end came Every reveal was boring. Every plot twist was a limp noodle. But nothing ever did. The MC was a boring, stupid, wishy-washy, moron. Aren't psychotherapists supposed to be great at asking the right questions? I wanted to punch her. Jun 21, Emily M rated it did not like it Shelves: , crime-thriller-mystery-suspense , couldnt-finish , chick , marriage. I am pages in and officially calling it quits. Plus there's just wayyy too much foreshadowing -- so much so that I don't feel like I need to read the rest of the book to know the ending. Sorry, is this severe? I do think the book has a interesting premise, but the writing wasn't outstanding enough to make up for the fact that this book which is packaged as a thriller, but perhaps is not, exactly has a lot of pacing issues. I do think it also says an awful lot about how we and not just therapists, who think they know everything about human behavior judge the choices of others before we are willing to examine our own. And it also makes some interesting points about marriage. Like that it's scary and not always a good idea and that you should probably avoid it at all costs -- or maybe that's just just my own biased reading of marriage in general. I can't say I'd recommend this, though I'm sure other people may have a different read on the book. Am I allowed to rate this if I didn't actually finish it? I'm doing it anyways. View all 12 comments. Mar 28, JanB rated it really liked it. Compulsively readable, well-written, and thought- provoking. Grace is a therapist, married to a pediatric oncologist, and mother of a 12 year old son, Henry. But to Grace, life is good and about to get better with the publication of her book. The book's title is You Should Have Known nice touch! Her book is getting a lot of media buzz, including a Vogue photo shoot and a guest spot on the Today Show. However, it soon becomes clear Grace is in deep denial and has failed to heed her own advice. Much of what the reader was told previously turns out to be only one perspective of the truth. Her entire life begins to slowly unravel. I found the ending a little too pat, and so the 4 stars instead of 5. Apr 07, Malena Watrous rated it liked it. This book is all about the trees. Page by page, sentence by sentence, there's lots of good stuff. But if you stand back a bit, I question a lot of the craft choices that added up to the whole. I like the premise--or at least, I find it intriguing: the notion that this woman Grace has no inkling that her husband was a serial cheater with the capacity to kill. A total sociopath. And that the woman in question is a therapist who considers herself an astute observer of humanity, and has written a boo This book is all about the trees. And that the woman in question is a therapist who considers herself an astute observer of humanity, and has written a book admonishing women who didn't see the all too obvious signs. The premise screams irony a little too loudly perhaps, but it's still compelling. I like psychological thrillers, so I was excited to check it out. I also like "unlikeable" characters, so some of Grace's flaws didn't bother me at all. That she is aloof, a bit snobby and superior, casting judgments on everyone save herself--fine. The private school world of Manhattan entertained me in its well parodied familiarity. I thought that the auction set piece was terrific--loved the opening where the auctioneers sells a glass of water for 12K. He doesn't disappear from the book or NYC for at least pages. I felt like she really should have shown him with his family that morning or at some point before he goes AWOl. It was simply impossible to form a complete sense of the extent to which Grace deluded herself about him without having seen him interacting with her or their son--without knowing him in the slightest. The son is okay and playing in a fiddling band. The mom has a new love interest. They have a great new dog. They're reunited with the husband's long suffering family, who are themselves all mending. It's just not realistic that you'd find out this guy was a murdering psychopath and "heal" or have "closure" that fast. The extent of the happy ending made this novel, which otherwise seemed like it wanted to be a serious treatment of a semi-plausible recognizable from the media situation, into something that felt much more "chick-litty. It's not that I wanted her punished, I just wanted the book to stay realistic. In particular I didn't think that the son would be as A- ok as he seemed. The ending of the book indeed the whole book also seemed never to make real the character of the murdered woman herself. It's always focused on how this family--his acknowledged family--deals with learning the truth about him. Just as we never meet Jonathan, we also never meet in scene the woman's 4th grade son or existing husband. I would have liked to see Grace have to deal with them--to get knocked out of her narrow perspective a little more. Near the end, she's still fixating on wanting her dead mother's good wedding china, which her stepmother took. I thought: really? Would anyone really care about china, after the entire foundation of their entire life was destroyed? Mar 10, Cindy Bokma rated it it was ok. I loved the premise of this novel- Grace, a therapist, has written a self help book for women called You Should Have Known and its slated to become a bestseller. Grace is married to Jonathan, a successful pediatric oncologist, and has a son Henry. Grace and Jonathan are never together in the book so as a reader, we have no frame of reference for their relationship but Grace is happy in her marriage in her book, she s I loved the premise of this novel- Grace, a therapist, has written a self help book for women called You Should Have Known and its slated to become a bestseller. Grace and Jonathan are never together in the book so as a reader, we have no frame of reference for their relationship but Grace is happy in her marriage in her book, she shows how women should know whether their potential partner is suitable or not. A mother at her sons's school is brutally murdered and Grace, like everyone else in her wealthy neighborhood and her son's fancy private school, is shaken up. Suddenly the police start questioning Grace. Jonathan is supposedly away at a conference in Cleveland Does he have a connection to the murdered woman? When was the last time Grace even talked to Jonathan? Why does the author describe Birkin bags? I would guess that Grace would launch into an investigation of her own and try to track down her husband but short of going through her husbands closet, she doesn't do much to figure out his whereabouts. His cell phone is home but dead and I wondered why she didn't charge it up and see if there were clues on it. We don't really know Jonathan, there are tangents where the author goes off and writes about secondary characters in such depth yet they are not critical to the plot. I was really frustrated with this book because it had the potential to be a real page turner! Grace, Grace, Grace, oh how hard you were to take with your sanctimonious habit of telling people what they had done wrong, all the while guilty of the same thing yourself! Your utter lack of self- awareness was headache inducing. The love and adoration you showered on your son could have been shared with a few others… your husband, your father, a friend. Instead you lived in this bubble of what you thought your life ought to be and was, so full of pride that you had made it reality and it made m Grace, Grace, Grace, oh how hard you were to take with your sanctimonious habit of telling people what they had done wrong, all the while guilty of the same thing yourself! Instead you lived in this bubble of what you thought your life ought to be and was, so full of pride that you had made it reality and it made me disgusted with you. Not only were you judgemental, you were clueless. Clueless about your husband and everything that came after him. I should have felt more sympathy for you than I did, but you wanted to live in denial, not knowing the truth unless it was thrust upon you and that just made you unlikable and weak. I do wish you well, seeing you come out the other side of your nightmare gave me a little hope for your future. I hope you grab it with both hands and keep your eyes wide open. Good Luck, A gal who sorta liked reading about your train wreck Mar 25, Claire rated it really liked it. While they are not as wealthy as the parents of Henry's classmates at Reardon, they live a comfortable life. Grace's mother has died and her father remarried, so Grace and Jonathan live in her parent's former apartment. Jonathan is a pediatric oncologist, and we see him nearly entirely through Grace's eyes througho You Should Have Known is the story of therapist Grace Sachs, who appears to have a realistically ideal life with her husband, Jonathan, and their only child, Henry in New York City. Jonathan is a pediatric oncologist, and we see him nearly entirely through Grace's eyes throughout the book. Grace has just had a book accepted for publication called, "You Should Have Known", based on her theory that someone you are dating tells you almost everything you need to know about them in the beginning few dates -- before you really establish whether or not you like each other. That he may have done more than experiment with gay sex in college? That he dislikes women? That his inferiority complex would make him a less-than-ideal partner? All these things can be learned if women since that's really her target readership - I'm not just trying to slam men will subdue their attraction to someone and listen to what their dates are actually saying. How ironic it is, then, when the mother of a child at Henry's school is killed, and Grace finds that Jonathan is mysteriously linked to the dead woman. I'm making this sound like a thriller, which this book both is, and is not. This is an extremely cerebral book, where emotions are held fairly firmly in check. That is due in large part to the fact that we see everything from Grace's point of view, and she is an extremely analytical and logical woman. She cannot comprehend that the man she had been married to for so long might not be the person she thought he was, and that her whole life has been a lie. Once the pieces start unraveling and it takes about pages for this to happen, so you've got to be patient and just immerse yourself in Grace's world, even though you may find yourself murmuring, "get to the point, already" they reveal in spectacular fashion, the manner in which someone who observes so much can actually see so little. I raced through the book, and the sense of foreboding that it gives you cannot be understated. I kept checking on my husband, who was woodworking in our garage, just to be sure he hadn't vanished somewhere. The ending wraps up a little too neatly, but after what Grace and Henry had been through, I didn't really mind. I needed a respite from the nearly constant revelations about Jonathan, and I wanted Grace to have a little bit of happiness, if only a page or two. I give this book four out of five stars because I just didn't feel an emotional connection with Grace. I don't believe the reader is supposed to. Grace represents a certain kind of intelligent, analytical woman who appears to be completely wrapped up on her own family and her own concerns. Paul Muldoon. The New York Times. Charity Shumway. July 17, The Dead, Kirkus Reviews. May 20, The Mystery Reader. Archived from the original on Retrieved The Boston Globe. Archived from the original on March 28, The Choice Blog. Entertainment Weekly. Huffington Post. The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved 20 January Retrieved 13 February The New Yorker. The Gallery Press. Categories : 20th-century American novelists births Living people 21st-century American novelists American women novelists 20th-century American women writers 21st-century American women writers 20th-century American essayists 21st-century American essayists American women non-fiction writers. Namespaces Article Talk. Views Read Edit View history. Help Learn to edit Community portal Recent changes Upload file. 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