Come With Me starts out so strong. The initial pages grabbed me and pulled me in so much, I thought I had that rare 5-star read on my hands. So the fact that it slid downhill to a 2-star read by the end, well, I'm just as surprised as you are.
On a seemingly regular day, Aaron's life is turned upside down when his wife Allison is killed by a random act of violence. He is overcome with grief and haunted by her loss. When he looks through her belongings, he comes across an unexplained receipt. Before he can move on, he has to get to the bottom of it.
I was riveted at the start. I found the initial chapters to be compelling and heartbreaking. Of course Aaron is consumed with grief and lost in this world without Allison, especially after such an unexpected and tragic death. The writing is atmospheric and full of sadness and longing, and I was totally on board. I also couldn't wait to see what secrets and mysteries Allison was hiding.
But then the story kind of stalled on the atmosphere of grief. I felt like I was just reading the same passages over and over, mostly on how sad Aaron is and how he can't let his wife go. He sees her in all the shadows and corners. He sees her in their closet and in the flickering lights. He sees her in the dark and in the mirror. Yep, I got it.
As for the mystery, it unfolds at a snail's pace with barely any developments. I thought there would be secrets to uncover about Allison, but it turns out she was merely looking into something else. So instead of this being Aaron investigating and putting together clues, it becomes him trying to figure out what his wife knew. He does this by obsessing about her, intuiting stuff from his gut, and proceeding as if whatever he thinks up must be correct. It's like my most hated trope—the drugged up, confused female narrator—has turned into a grief-ed up, obsessed male narrator.
There is also a supernatural element in here, which feels like it was shoehorned into the story. Is it supposed to be scary? I found it mostly annoying because it contributes to the extremely slow pacing of the story. Whenever there could be development, instead we spend many paragraphs on descriptions of lightbulbs flickering and dark shadows in corners, which all turn out to be nothing.
There are also a couple of other things that were really problematic for me. Every time there's a flashback of Allison, I liked her less and less, until I could no longer understand why Aaron even loved her to begin with. To top it off, there's clearly a scene of rape in there that the story just glosses over, as if it should be all right since the two people involved are married.
My other big problem with the storyline is that I'm not a fan of vigilante justice, especially ones that are arrived at via intuition rather than hard facts. There are multiple examples of this in the story, with both Allison and Aaron perpetuating it. And the excuse given is always grief. Spare me, please. Lots of people lose loved ones, yet they manage to continue on their lives without beating up or killing people.
This story had so much potential. I just wish it transitioned from a story about grief into the mystery it was meant to be. Instead, we get stuck on the grief, and there just wasn't enough plot advancement or even much sense to sustain hundreds of pages.
Readaroo Rating: 2 stars
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