Truthfully, I had no idea that Caroline Kepnes had another Joe Goldberg stroy in her arsenal, but it turns out it belongs in the form of a prequel, You First.
In my opinion, this is the smart way to go. Admittedly, I don’t remeber how old Joe is when we meet him in the first novel of the series, but here he is a fresh hgih school dropout at seventeen and working at Mooney’s bookstore. It’s barely post 9/11, where he spent that time locked in the infamous cage, but reading about that time of life through the perspective of several people that lived in New York City was really interesting. To me it came off a bit too casual, and maybe a bit insensitive, but I suppose there were people like that who weren’t really impacted by that day despite living practically in it.
But Joe is introduced to us on a subway, where every woman he sees he falls in love with. But the thoughts are fleeting, and maybe more aligned with most teenage boys than I realize. He loves his job at the bookstore, and this is the time when the internet has barely come to be. But, Joe does fold to use it to his advantage to find a “bookstore babe” that he helped out earlier in the day. Maybe Mr. Mooney is a bit of a psychic, because he reads this girl as trouble immediately. Mr. Mooney is also kind of gross in a lot of ways, so it’s hard to take stock in what a character like that says. But before Joe can post his Craigslist “missed connection,” his bookstore babe posts it first!
When they meet, Joe learns her name is Vail, after the city in Colorado, and she’s about to be twenty-five. That doesn’t stop either of them from flirting non-stop on their first movie date. But this is an automatic reason for Joe to not persue Vail any further. He’s a book guy and she’s a TV and movie girl, and neither of them seem willing to bend of their preferred media. Still, Joe falls hard immediately. And then Vail kind of jerks him around for the rest of the book. She catches on pretty early that he’s young, but still persues him sexually when it’s convenient for her. Joe doesn’t care. He’s a slave to her pussy, and in an effort to become more appealing, he starts listening to the advice of a local barista he’s befriended in order to become the perfect Vail-magnet.
Of course, things become messy once Joe finally gets out of his love-bomb haze. Vail’s still young, and therefore, not as put together as you’d think. No matter how well Joe treats her, and how much he changes about his life, Vail has eyes for someone else, and this is the catalyst to all of Joe’s future problem-solving skills. The stream of conciousness in this book is still very-much in Joe’s voice that we get in all of the other novels, and even though he’s just a teenager in this book, his still rather mature for his age in a lot of ways. Somehow he always gets entangled with the most messy people, but perhaps that’s just a reflection of his life growing up.
All in all, I was satisfied with this prequel. If you like any of the other novels in this series, this one will be just as good. There is something about Kepnes’ writing style, at least with these characters, that’s a little exhaustively long-winded for me, but all in all she present well fleshed-out characters and a fun story. I’d definitely be interested in a prequel series if that’s something Netflix decides they want to do someday.