Providence by Caroline Kepnes: A Review

Please keep in mind that this review may contain spoilers. I started reading this book on January 13th, 2022 and completed it the following day. The details of the book are a bit fuzzy to me as it's been a little over a week since reading it. However, I hope you enjoy reading my review of this book. 

        Why I wanted to read it:

    If you've seen my profile, then you know that I really enjoy Caroline Kepnes's You series. When I saw that she wrote a standalone novel, I just had to read it and see how it could compare to the Joe Goldberg saga. Don't get me wrong, I love the You series, but I felt that a more contemporary love story with a less complicated storyline would hit the spot. 

    The process of reading this book:

    I opted to listen to the audiobook version of Providence so that I didn't have to read the physical book outside of work. As you'll see for many of my reviews and posts, I find that the constant droning sounds of the machinery at work help me to concentrate and enjoy stories. 

The voice acting for this book was ok in my opinion. Just as in Caroline Kepnes's other books, the readers tend to have a lot of inflection and energy in their voices as they narrate the story. I felt as though I was watching a movie.

The book is written in three perspectives: Jon, Chloe, and Eggs, and it takes place over the course of many years. 

The story starts with Jon and Chloe as middle schoolers; they are friends despite Chloe being well-liked and Jon being bullied often. 

One day, Jon is attacked and abducted by a substitute teacher while walking in the woods.

He wakes up four years later in a mall basement, confused about his surroundings. As the memory of who abducted him comes back, he realizes that the man has left him a note on the back of a Lovecraft book. He eventually puts the pieces together that the substitute teacher has performed an experiment on him that gives him intriguing powers, if you can call them that. But I'll get to that later.

Upon waking up, he obviously wants to find his way home to his parents and of course, Chloe. His hope is to make up for lost time and tell her how he really feels about her. Upon seeing Jon, Chloe passes out unexpectedly. He also affects his mother and accidentally kills her beloved dog. Jon begins to understand that he is basically a living manifestation of the character from the H.P. Lovecraft book that his teacher left him. Somehow, he is able to affect people with his heart, using emotion to physically harm people. His body also heals itself, even from life-threatening injury. Before he fully understands his affliction, he accidentally kills Chloe's best friend. This prompts Jon to leave town for a year or two.

Speaking of Chloe, she has been in a relationship with the boy who used to torment Jon as a child. Jon's disappearance brought them closer together, but Jon never seemed to escape her mind. She is a gifted artist and spent years drawing age progressed portraits of Jon in the hopes of finding him. Of course, Jon's return home after four years makes her rethink her relationship with her boyfriend. Even when he disappears again, she still yearns for him.

Going back to Jon, he accidentally kills more people, causing them to have heart attacks. His victims range from people who he finds attractive to people who provoke him. He eventually notices the signs and can predict when someone will die. After several victims and the police looking into the deaths as suspicious, Jon moves again and becomes a paperboy. During this time, he sets his focus on finding the man who changed him in the hopes of being normal again. He wants nothing more than to be with Chloe, but fears that he'll kill her. 

At some point in the story, a detective named Eggs begins to investigate the deaths. He is able to direct himself to Jon, although he's still on the move and is using different aliases. I'm not going to go too much into detail about Eggs, just because I don't care to. He's a good detective, has problems abiding by his wife's rules, and is eventually stricken with cancer. That's about it.

After another instance of passing out and being evaded by Jon, Chloe eventually gets back together with her ex, who hates Jon, and they get engaged. During this time, Jon uses his powers to become  somewhat of a vigilante.

Anyway, the story kind of comes to a climax when Jon and Chloe try to meet. He tells her he loves her, but they are interrupted by her fiance, who has a gun. He tries to kill both Chloe and Jon, but fails. Also, the teacher ends up in the room somehow, but it was poorly written in my opinion. Eggs comes in to witness what happened and kind of covers Jon so that he can get away. 

In the end, Jon and Chloe are together, although not physically due to his affliction. He's still trying to figure out a cure so that they can be together. Despite everything, Chloe and Jon are destined to be together.

    My criticisms     

    As you may have noticed, I glossed over details because I simply found them boring. Some of the events or details in the story don't actually amount to anything. It's surprising considering the writing of Caroline Kepnes's You series, where all the details are integral pieces in the end. It's almost like she had the bare bones idea for the plot of the story and just opted to add filler for the rest. I can appreciate that she wanted to develop Egg's character by adding a backstory, especially about his marriage. However, I feel that it didn't really add much to the story other than like 100 pages. Also, the detective work was good, but he came to conclusions a little too easily, if you know what I mean. Also, I don't feel that there was much closure or defining information about exactly what happened to Jon, specifically what went on while he was in a coma and what the family was doing during this time.

Final Thoughts

    The book just overall feels rushed and lacks the suspense that I believe it was going for. Obviously the book isn't meant to be super realistic considering that the main character has superhuman powers, but I just found the relationships among characters to be unrealistic. For example, the characters placed in the story to be the "bad guys" are extremely aggressive and volatile just because. You feel like you're reading this book forever because of the insignificant parts, and you fly through the important parts; it's a lot of build up for nothing in my opinion. And I love supernatural love stories as much as the next person, but I find that this was poorly executed and downright boring. She should have just left The Dunwich Horror alone. Yikes. 

In the end, I gave this book three out of five stars. The first few chapters were well-written and lured me in thinking it would be a compelling captivity and escape story. As the characters developed from children to adults, their diction also progressed which was realistic. And because I am a lover of love stories and the characters were likeable, I was rooting for Jon and Chloe throughout. I was patient in reading all of the details in between major events, thinking that they would all build to something. However, they simply didn't. At some point, I lost interest in the book. I followed through in reading it of course, but I feel that I just didn't get the closure I wanted. I hope Jon and Chloe are able to hold each other, but I guess we can only speculate. 

Image courtesy of Wikipedia and Caroline Kepnes