By Ghina El Darazi | Staff Writer
I don’t know what it is exactly about plot twists, but I find myself more likely to pick up a book once I hear it has one. Cognitive scientist Vera Tobin says it’s more about the narrative’s setup than the actual twist, “As readers or viewers of a story, after having seen the twist, we tend to look back at the material we were presented with before and are able to enjoy and understand it more” (1). Whenever I read a book knowing it has a twist, I challenge myself to see if I can use what’s given to me in the setup and guess the upcoming twist. I win the challenge only when I correctly guess the forthcoming plot-twist. Here’s what happened while reading the following three titles: Behind Her Eyes, The Silent Patient, and We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves.
Behind Her Eyes by Sarah Pinborough
A psychiatrist named David moves to a new town along with Adele, his seemingly perfect wife. Louise, who happens to work at a doctors’ clinic, is surprised to see that the guy she had a sexual encounter with last week is the new, married, doctor taking the vacant office at her workplace. Louise finds herself more involved in David’s life; not only by working with him and digging into his past but also by befriending his wife who gradually shows troubled signs. The story is told in chapters alternating between Adele’s and Louise’s points of view. When I first picked it up, I thought it was the usual psychological thriller knotted around a love triangle. But reaching the end, I joined thousands of other readers in their utter surprise at what this story turned out to be. Pinborough had laid out the rules of this book’s world clearly and wrote her story accordingly, she simply took her time in revealing what those rules were to us readers. Although many reviews say Pinborough’s ending is absurd, it only adds more significance to her calculated and paced setup that preceded it. Reading this book expanded the scope for me of what a twist can do to shift a story’s events.
Score: Twists 1 – 0 Ghina
The Silent Patient by Alex Michaelides
This novel follows the story of a famous artist who decided to stop speaking after her husband’s murder. She becomes the prime suspect in the case and refuses to communicate with anyone except through her paintings. The story is told from her therapist’s point of view. Figuring out the twist here is feasible as the author isn’t hiding any secrets, but is rather deceiving his readers. He shows us all the events and characters, shifting the reality of things a bit before revealing what is going on. I would recommend reading this if you’re looking for a murder-mystery novel with a satisfying last sentence that wraps things up neatly.
Updated Score: Twists 1 – 1 Ghina
We Are All Completely Besides Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler
In here, our narrator is telling us her family’s life story, but she is jumping between different eras and purposefully hiding some events. She tells us her brother and sister are missing but skips over how and when they went missing. While I thought the twist would reveal to us where the siblings were, it was something else entirely. This twist comes relatively early compared to the previous books mentioned. Many people said they stopped reading this book after the twist as it was too nonsensical for them. To me, however, for one reason or another, something about this book felt genuine and I found myself wanting to hear more about our narrator’s journey, although some bits felt a little dull and unnecessarily scientific. I recommend checking this book out if you feel like reading about a twist that shifts up the way you see a story’s set of characters.
Final Score: Twists 2 – 1 Ghina
I won’t twist these scores up; numbers say I lost this self-imposed challenge but reality says I gained three fun reads!