Hello beautiful people! Welcome to a new review! For this review, we get into one of Freida’s newer book releases, Dear Debbie. While I usually enjoy Freida’s books a lot, this one fell flat for me in a few different ways. While it’s not one of my favourites by her, it was still an enjoyable mystery to follow, and she has some much better reads to check out in her catalogue.
Main Characters:
Debbie: A seemingly normal mother who works as an advice columnist. Things start to go odd in her and her family’s life, and soon we see Debbie struggle to get control back. When things snap, she goes down a path that no one in her life would have suspected.
Cooper: Debbie’s husband, who quickly becomes concerned when chaos seems to randomly ensue in their lives, but slowly works to figure out what the connection is to him and his wife.
Lexi and Izzy: Debbie and Cooper’s teenage daughters, and one of the first examples we see that maybe everything isn’t as rosy as their mother makes it seem. With strained relationships, we see that Debbie may not be the woman she shows herself to be.
Harley: Debbie’s friend that she meets at the gym, a seemingly nothing character who has a lot more going on under the surface.
My Review
As mentioned earlier, Dear Debbie just didn’t do it for me in a few different ways. Overall, it’s not a bad plot, a seemingly normal mother losing it who ends up going on a personal justice spree, but the way it played out was odd and just didn’t hit. I also really struggled with the characters and found myself a bit more annoyed than intrigued with their antics. With Debbie, I found her to be definitely one of Frieda’s more questionable main characters, which is usually something I really enjoy from her books. But for some reason, I just never fully connected with Debbie. There’s clearly more going on beneath the surface with her, and while some aspects of her story were interesting, I never found her as compelling or addictive to follow as some of McFadden’s other morally grey characters. Because of these factors, I ended up landing on a 6/10 rating overall, not one of her best reads, but not a terrible one overall.
Dear Debbie follows Debbie as strange events and buried secrets slowly begin to unravel around her life. When seemingly normal mother of two Debbie starts to lose her mask, we see a woman attempt to regain control back but by questionable means. Desperate to avenge every wrong thing that has been done in her life, Debbie goes down a path of destruction, threatening to bring her family down with her. As the story progresses, questions start building around who Debbie really is, what she may be hiding, and whether the people around her are actually telling the truth. Other questions about her husband and her children’s lives also come to light, throwing different issues from all sides into the mix. Like many of Frieda McFadden’s thrillers, the story leans heavily into suspicion, shifting perspectives, and twists designed to constantly make you question what’s really happening.
This definitely wasn’t my favourite Frieda McFadden book, but I still had a decently enjoyable time with it overall. I think part of the reason my rating ended up a little lower is honestly that I’ve read so many of her books at this point that I’ve started to catch onto some of her patterns and storytelling style. That’s not really a criticism of her specifically; it’s more a sign that I’ve consumed an unreasonable amount of Frieda McFadden thrillers. Because of that, I found myself predicting certain aspects of the story fairly early on. I definitely suspected part of Debbie’s storyline from the beginning, and while there were still twists that genuinely surprised me, the overall mystery just didn’t hit as hard for me as some of her other books have.
The biggest disconnect for me, though, was Debbie herself. Normally, I love it when Frieda writes morally questionable or slightly sketchy main characters. It’s one of the things that makes her books so fun to binge. But with Debbie, I just never felt fully invested in her. There was something about her character that kept me emotionally at arm’s length, even when the story was trying to ramp up the tension.
That being said, the book is still super readable. Frieda has a way of writing that makes her books hard to put down, even when they aren’t your favourite. The pacing keeps things moving, and there’s always enough suspicion and tension to make you keep flipping pages.
The ending was also definitely surprising, but I just didn’t get that same wow feeling that some of her stronger twist endings have given me before. It worked, but it didn’t fully land emotionally for me.
Overall, despite my criticisms, I still think this was one of her better newer releases. Even when Frieda McFadden misses a little for me personally, her books are still incredibly entertaining and easy to fly through.
I hope you enjoyed this review. Thank you for checking it out! Feel free to subscribe to the page to be one of the first to know when I release a new one.
*** Don’t read any further if you don’t want to see any spoilers ***
I wanted to get into a spoiler section for this one because I feel like it explains why some of these things fell flat for me.
I could tell throughout the book that there was something more to Debbie than what she was presenting.
She makes friends with Harley, a woman she meets at the gym. Harley believes that she is having an affair with Debbie’s husband, Cooper, but she isn’t. She is actually in a relationship with Jesse, Cooper’s friend and co-worker, who also just so happened to sexually assault Debbie when they were in college. Debbie seems to have always been aware Jesse was the one who assaulted her, but since she goes by another name, I guess he never put the pieces together?
Debbie does think, however, for a time that Cooper really is cheating on her (I think, this part tripped me up) and doesn’t know that it’s Jesse using her husband’s name, but she does know that Jesse was the one who ruined her life. Cooper is hiding a secret, but it’s just that has a recovering alcoholic, and that’s why he is gone, and Debbie thinks he is cheating.
Debbie sets Jesse up for the murders of Cooper’s boss and eventually Harley, but again, it’s just super all over the place, so I wasn’t sure if she was actually at first trying to frame Cooper as well and then when she found out it wasn’t him, changed things. She also set Jesse up to be framed for embezzling from the company he and Cooper work at, so I do think that she must have known all along what Jesse was doing and was planning to destroy him, but not Cooper. Cooper does find out what she has done, but at the end, it seems to kind of go with it. Just a bit confusing and messy to follow, and just not a great ending overall. I did suspect that there was something more to Debbie, and a part of me could tell that Cooper wasn’t really sleeping with Harley based on some other things, but I just didn’t suspect who she really was.
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