I am reviewing the book Watch Me Disappear, by Janelle Brown.

I gave this book book 3 stars out of 4. It was a little hard to get into this book. It wasn’t until the end that I really started to get into it. Therefore, it took me months to finish.

SPOIL ALERT

This book is about Billie Flanagan, a wild child, but she was a woman. She was witty, fun, open, wild, wasn’t afraid of anything. She was married to her husband Johnathan and had a daughter Olive.

Billie has what seems like a life crisis, and starts to ponder her life. She was a free spirit, didn’t really like to be tied down, until she met her husband. However after many years, that didn’t last.

Billie goes off for a hike, leaving her husband and daughter at home. A few days go by and she never came home. Johnathan and Olive start to worry and they send a search party. The search party finds Billies shoe and she is presumed dead.

After a year goes by, Olive starts to have visions of her. She thinks she’s trying to tell her. She gives her clues and Olive tries and finds her. She’s convinced she is alive somewhere. She tells her father, but he dismisses her.

Johnathan feels like he’s going through a midlife crisis. He quits his job, and writes a memoir about his beloved wife. He finds himself however, finding clues and things hidden from him, like the fact that Billie had a daughter, from a previous marriage, that she neglected to tell him. He starts up a relationship with Billies best friend Harmony, and his daughter is skipping school and avoiding him all together. He feels like nothing is going right for him, until he comes across Billies laptop.

Johnathan can’t get into his wife’s computer, so he hands it off to his friend to crack the password. He hired a private investigator, because Johnathan realized a lot of money is taken from him.

Johnathan finds out an address of someone that was Billies computer of a man, or he thought was a man. He also found a letter that Billie wrote. It seemed to be intimate in his eyes. He thought she left him and Olive for another man. He hid the computer and didn’t want to see it anymore. He thought if she wanted to disappear and be with that man then let her.

Olive finds the laptop, and retrieves the address. She leaves school and takes a drive. When she pulls up to this address of Ryan, she knocks on the door and to her surprise she sees her mother looking back at her, except it wasn’t really her mother. It was Billies daughter.

When Jonathan found out that Olive skipped school, he knew that Olive found the laptop and went to that address. He pulled up, knocked on the door and there she was. A younger version of his wife.

Billie did hike up to the mountains, but she knew her life was over with Johnathan and Olive. She faked her own death by throwing a shoe into a rock, thinking she got stuck.

She hired a private investigator to get a new passport and to change her name. She left and started anew in Denmark.

I did like this book, but sometimes I think, she was really selfish. She just left her daughter and husband. She didn’t tell them about her other daughter. She kept so many things from them. She felt like she just needed to start over. That to me is a shitty mother, and really selfish. But hey, it’s fiction right haha it’s different then my other reads.