Stop whatever you’re doing & read "When No One Is Watching" Now!

by Rana Asfour

Seriously when Bethanne from @dearbookmaven & Hannah Oliver Depp from @loyaltybooks were raving about "When No One Is Watching" by Alyssa Cole on Monday, they were SPOT ON — It. Is. So. Good! —No wonder it was nearly on every list of best 2020 books.

Chilling thriller. Had to continuously stop reading to catch my breath and reassure myself that it’s fiction because EVERYTHING about it felt uncomfortably close to something that could actually happen ‘when no one is watching’.

Won’t give details for fear I’d be giving it away. However, the book’s jacket describes it as a thriller in which the gentrification of a Brooklyn neighbourhood takes on a sinister new meaning after a push to ‘revitalise’ the community may be more deadly than advertised, when born & raised Brooklyn resident Sydney Green observes that her neighbourhood seems to change every time she blinks and the neighbours she’s known all her life are disappearing. So, where do people actually go when gentrification pushes them out?

In the epigraph, Alyssa Cole quotes W.E.B Bu Bois: ‘One is astonished in the study of history at the recurrence of the idea that evil must be forgotten, distorted, skimmed over...the difficulty, of course, with this philosophy is that history loses its value as an incentive and example; it paints perfect men and noble nations, but it does not tell the truth.’
​
I feel an imminent film 😎