The Collective by Alison Gaylin

Hello beautiful people! Welcome to a new review! For this review, I get in a twisty thriller The Collective by Alison Gaylin that focuses on collective grief, and the dangers of the hive mentality.

Main Characters:

• Camile Gardner: Lost her only child years ago after a suspicious death and despite her best efforts Camile can’t get Emily justice, continues to spiral in the grief of her daughter’s death and eventually joins an online group where mothers who have lost their children fantasize with each other about hurting the people who hurt their children, Camile soon realizes that the group may be more then talk and she has to decide how far she will go to get justice for her daughter
• Harris Blanchard: The man who Camile feels got away with hurting her daughter, then leaving her out in the cold to die alone
• Wendy: Camile’s friend who she eventually meets through the online forum and even though they are supposed to be anonymous the two stay in contact due to Camile feeling a connection with her

My Review

I enjoyed The Collective by Alison Gaylin quite a bit, but there were a few aspects of the book overall that I struggled with. The plot itself for The Collective is really interesting and unique and I was pulled in quickly by the ways the book got you attached to the characters and what was going to happen next. However, I was often left with the question throughout the book ‘Where is this going?’.

Overall I gave The Collective by Alison Gaylin a 7/10. I struggled to rate it overall but landed on that because while I really enjoyed a lot of the book, I really didn’t end up enjoying the ending and it felt a bit unsatisfying for what we go through for most of the book. The Collective follows a grieving mother Camile as she continues to try and move forward from the loss of her only child Emily. A high school student at the time, Emily went out to a college party, and was found frozen and half dead from her injuries, and she eventually succumbed to them. Harris Blanchard Emily’s love interest at the time was heavily suspected in her attack but never came to any charges. Camile knows he did it, but Harris comes from a wealthy, well-known family, so trying to get any type of real justice is not as attainable as it should be. Able to get little comfort from a married man named Luke who received Emily’s heart upon her death, Camile needs more to get over these intense feelings she has inside of her. After hearing of one online group for grieving mothers, Camile is eventually brought down a rabbit hole that takes her to a dark website where mothers whose children were taken from them in horrifying ways can chat with each other and fantasize about what they would do to the people who hurt their loved one. Feeling that this is more up her alley than a cushy Facebook group Camile decides to dive into this world. The more time she spends in the forum the more she comes to discover that the fantasies that are talked about in this group may have a bit more to them. Invited into the collective a sub-group within the online forum Camile finds that she may be able to get the revenge for her daughter she has been looking for, but is it all worth it?

I really enjoyed Camile as the main character. I felt like her grief was very real and raw and despite the fact it had been 5 years since the loss of her daughter due to a lack of closure she really hasn’t been able to move on. I think it made sense for her to only have one child because I am not sure her grief would have been this obsessive if she had someone else to focus her love on. She blamed her ex-husband heavily for their daughter being gone due to him allowing her to go to the party when she was away at work. All she had to focus her energy on was getting some form of justice for her daughter, even if it wasn’t in the traditional sense. There is an aspect to her obsessiveness where after losing Emily she continually follows Harrisons achievements preoccupying her energy on everything Emily didn’t get to do. In my opinion, I felt it was very real. Death is much easier to deal with when there is some kind of closure. When there isn’t closure or there are ended things the person’s loved ones often struggle to move on, craving the answers that the person they love can’t give. I am not saying that people who deal with this type of grief never move on but the fact that it had only been five years made sense in my opinion why she was still this intense.

An issue I mentioned earlier that I had with the book is that I often just didn’t really feel like I got where the book was going. Don’t get me wrong that didn’t make it unenjoyable or anything but I just didn’t feel like I had a full grasp on the plot. Once Camile joins the collective and we get a sense of what it is it’s clear where that direction will go, but how is it going to all be tied up isn’t as clear. I get more into the spoiler section but the ending had a big twist, but it didn’t go in a way in my opinion that really felt good. It was one of those twists in my opinion where I was like ‘Was this really needed?’ I don’t know it just got to me a bit. It was just a bit unsatisfying for everything we went through with this book. The book picks up a lot once Camile joins the collective and tells them about Harrison, but as I said it just becomes a then-what-what situation. I think there were a few other ways to go for the ending that personally I would have liked a bit more, but it is what it is.

Overall The Collective by Alison Gaylin is a super interesting thriller with a unique plot and dynamic characters. I felt like the aspect of revenge, specifically a mother’s revenge is something a lot of people can relate to. We’ve all had bad things done to us, but how far would we go to feel vindicated? I also love a good female rage book and this book is filled with it page to page. The way that Camile and her daughter are treated in the media and Harrison lifted on this pedestal is very reminiscent of many sexual assault crimes that happen all the time. The woman gets blamed for going out and having fun,  and since the world wants the man to be fine he is given a pass because he has so much potential and no one wants to ruin that. It’s definitely a book that will get your blood boiling in different areas.

Has anyone else read The Collective by Alison Gaylin before? What did you think?

*** Don’t keep reading if you don’t want any spoilers ***

All I can say for the ending of this book is wtf! I cannot believe we went through all of this just to have it end this way.

As Camile joins the collective it becomes clear that it’s a group of women who intricately plan crimes to kill the people who hurt the children of other people in the group. For Camile to get revenge on Harrison she must take part in other collective crimes. It’s minuscule things like purchasing a knife and dropping it off in another place, and picking up another woman in the middle of the night and dropping her off at another place. It all connects but to keep suspicions down no collective member takes part in the crime connected to the person they want to go after. If anything the collective will actually send them on an activity so they have an alibi for the night of the crime.

Camile is sent into a whirlwind when she is no longer just doing small things and is requested to take a car to a spot with another member and then push it in. The only thing is there is a live human in the back. This becomes Camile’s downfall because after killing the man she becomes obsessed with what the collective is doing and why. Camile eventually comes to find out that the collective may not just be killing bad people but also people in the group who they felt have broken the rules, and Camile by looking at what she did for the collective has done just that. It was all kind of stupid because I felt like Camile was being unnecessarily noisy. Like girl you wanted this, just drop it and move on. She then becomes obsessed with finding out who the leader of the collective is. Why!! She just seemed to want to get herself into a dangerous situation.

I am jumping over a bit but the ending was just weird. Camile starts to see that the collective is following her and it’s because she has been looking into things she shouldn’t be. The book ends with Camile trying to escape the collective but then finding out that she was like the main person they were after all along. Turns out that the person who leads the collective lost a child, but an adult child. Years before Camile had called her therapist in the middle of the night. The therapist had been trying to create boundaries as Camile was becoming obsessive. I guess when the therapist answered the phone she eventually stumbled down the stairs and died. Camile of course was never blamed because it wasn’t her fault that this woman fell down the stairs after answering her call. However there is someone who blames her, the therapist’s mom, and the leader of the collective. Huh? I mean it was just so far-fetched and weird to me. Y’all did all this just to eventually kill Camile? I guess killing Harrison was like a gift for her before they went after her.

The book ends with the collective killing Camile for what she did to the leader’s daughter although I think everyone would agree she isn’t to blame for that. There was this weird part where Camile admitted she wanted the therapist to feel her pain and I just gave an eye roll. It doesn’t matter if she wanted her to feel her pain she didn’t push the damn woman down the stairs, like nothing excuses this. So, we went through this whole thing with Camile just for her to be the blame the whole time? It just didn’t sit right with me. I guess it showed that the collective is just full of unstable people.

I just totally didn’t see the book going this way, I suspected that the collective may try to go after her, but not for this reason at all.

Thank you for checking out this review, I hope you enjoyed it! Feel free to check out my socials @baddiebookreviews to be kept up to date for when I release a new review.