A Review of Megan Abbott’s “Give Me Your Hand”
Post Murder Syndrome
Megan Abbott’s Give Me Your Hand is considered to be, depending on the publication you read, one of the most anticipated books of the summer of 2018. Of course, there are reasons for this, but at the top of the list must be that Abbott is simply a gifted writer. Abbott’s forte is psychological thrillers about women who compete at very high levels against each other and all the evil things that these women do. This was the case with her breakout hit from a few years ago, Dare Me, and Abbott returns to this subject matter in her latest book. It is a taut page-turner once you get through to the book’s halfway point, and there were times where I had to just stop and tell myself that this was only a book, that the things that are happening didn’t actually happen to real people, and I should just try to chill out a bit.
The novel is about two women, Kit and Diane, and is set in two different time periods: first, the novel is set back in the pair’s high school days, when Diane unloads a bombshell of a secret on Kit, who is torn between telling someone the truth of the horrible thing Diane did and keeping pace with her as one of two female students in the school who is competing for a prestigious scholarship. Second, the novel is set in the present day, some 12 years later, with Kit, who is now a chemist and researcher, set to probably be given a post on a very prestigious study on the link between a pre-menstrual disorder and violence in women when Diane comes hopping into the lab — and it is expected that she will take a spot on the research team. What could go wrong? Lots, apparently.
I’m torn as to whether this is Abbott’s best book that I’ve read — in addition to Dare Me, I’ve paged through The Fever, a tale about disease in female high school students — or if Give Me Your Hand is the weakest of the three. The reason for the weakness is because the first 150 pages or so are fairly routine for this sort of thing — it doesn’t take much to figure out what Diane’s terrible secret is, which is revealed halfway through the book. However, the novel picks up from there at a galloping pace, and I couldn’t honestly figure out which way things would turn. True, the book does suffer a bit from having multiple endings, but for a sheer thrill ride of a novel, nothing beats the last 180 pages or so of Give Me Your Hand.
There’s something notably different about this book, and it’s that Abbott’s writing style has changed. Dare Me was full of clipped, masculine sentences (it was a book about a cheer-leading team, after all), while the writing in Give Me Your Hand is more fluid and straight-forward. While some might be sad that some of Abbott’s stylistic ticks are largely absent, the book is still a heart-quickening read about what ladies will do when pushed into a corner. As this novel deftly notes, women are indeed the fairer sex and are less likely to be prone to violence. But when Give Me Your Hand does turn violent, the blood flow is very nasty indeed. If you ever wondered what Sam Peckinpah might do if he had a set of ovaries, Give Me Your Hand comes pretty close at detailing that imagined scenario. Abbott spares nothing in her details of a murder, even of the seemingly bloodless sort, and the book’s pages are figuratively awash in crimson red.
This is also a novel about competition between women, and just how hard it is to rise in the ranks in any professional standing in a world inhabited by men, such as the scientific research world. If anything, Give Me Your Hand shows the inverse of the #MeToo movement, where women are kind of being portrayed as passive victims that nobody will believe (at least, as far as the courts go up here in Canada with some high profile sexual assault cases that have gone in favour of the defendant), so it comes at a very odd time in the global zeitgeist. In this novel, women will do virtually anything to get ahead — though some women, it should be noted, are torn between reporting the truth and being active participants in the competitive carnage that may lead to lives being lost. There’s a fair bit to chew on here when it comes to gender roles, and, if anything, Megan Abbott shows why she’s the ultimate woman writer writing about the bad things women do to other women (and men).
Overall, I quite enjoyed Give Me Your Hand even as it gave me heart palpitations from all of the twists and turns of the plot — just as I thought the book was going to go one way, it acknowledges the thought and then leads readers down another altogether unexpected slope. I have to be honest and say that I didn’t see the ending coming, which is a positive thing, though I do have questions about how a certain “murder weapon” used was pilfered without notice. Or how the nasty little secret that Diane harbors doesn’t get found out by the police. Give Me Your Hand, though, is a book about these details — and how they don’t really matter too much when it comes to being a woman who wants to climb the corporate ladder, integrity or not be damned. This is a thoughtful read with a lot of zip and pow, one that will make you think and sweat in equal measure. Give Me Your Hand shows that it’s tough to be a woman in terms of being taken seriously, but hopefully that fate doesn’t befall Megan Abbott. The effectiveness of her psychological thrillers or not, she’s one of the best prose stylists we have and her books, as brainy as they are, are a lot of fun, too.
Megan Abbott’s Give Me Your Hand will be published by Little, Brown, and Company on July 17, 2018.
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Get in touch: zacharyhoule@rogers.com.
