Disclaimer: I received this book as an ARC from St. Martin’s Press as part of a giveaway. This did not affect my rating or review. This book will be released on April 2, 2019.
Several months ago I had the opportunity to enter a giveaway for an advance copy of The Girl He Used to Know by Tracey Garvis Graves. I had not read any of the author’s previous books and tend to prefer historical romance to contemporaries (and in fact the author calls this a romance/women’s fiction hybrid). Additionally, I enjoy stories that have a dash of absurdity to them and this book is straightforward. I almost didn’t bother entering the giveaway but the fact that the storyline involved chess intrigued me so I took the chance and was lucky enough to receive the book. I am very glad I did so because I might not have read it otherwise and that would have been a shame because the book is excellent.
The Girl He Used to Know tells the story of Annika and Jonathan and alternates between their two viewpoints as well as skipping between their past and present. The book begins when they reconnect in a chance meeting in a grocery store. We learn that they were once in love but that something tore them apart. We also see them tentatively try to navigate a second attempt at making their relationship work.
While Annika is kind, generous, and beautiful, she has sensory sensitivities and difficulty reading people and her bluntness is offputting to many. She has coping strategies that she has learned to keep out of public sight and is fortunate to have a very good friend in her college roommate and later, a therapist who helps her navigate a confusing world. However, she does have many experiences with people who are cruel to her and she is anxious and lonely. She meets Jonathan at her chess club when he takes the place of her usual opponent for a game, much to her chagrin. He begins spending more time with her and they eventually start to date. Jonathan is conscientious about accommodating Annika and making her comfortable.
We know from the outset that things didn’t work out between them and that Annika is largely responsible, which is why this time around she is eager to show Jonathan that she is no longer the girl he used to know. What we don’t know is how things ended, and the book shows the two relationships – old and new – unfolding at the same time. It also shows us how Annika and Jonathan have grown as individuals and so we have hope for them to succeed where they failed previously. However, life is not always easy and the last 40-odd pages of the book had me gripping the book in fear. Only the fact that I was promised a happy ending kept me going. Keep the Kleenex handy is all I’m saying.
I did have one small complaint about the story though. Annika has a deep love for animals. She volunteered at a wildlife rehabilitation facility during college and it hurts her sensitive heart when tiny living things die. After she and Jonathan get back together, she shows him that she is fostering a mother cat and kittens in her apartment and plans to keep the mother. However, later she leaves town for an extended period and while I presume she made arrangements for someone to care for the cat (who now has a name and is presumably fully adopted) for her while she was away, it was not specifically addressed in the story. I really needed a throwaway line where she thanks her mom or somebody for taking the cat in temporarily. It was very uncharacteristic of Annika not to show concern over that. I wonder if it was addressed in the final version of the book (I did see some other very minor things in the ARC that needed editing as well but this stood out as a unresolved issue to me.)