How to Hide in Plain Sight by Emma Noyes #bookreview #romance #drama #fiction #mentalhealth #OCD

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Title: How to Hide in Plain Sight

Author:  Emma Noyes

Publisher: Berkley

Publication Date: Sept 10, 2024

Page Count:  394

My rating: 3 1/2 stars

About the book:

The unbreakable bonds of family and love are explored in this brilliant and tender story from the author of Guy’s Girl.

On the day she arrives in Canada for her older brother’s wedding, Eliot Beck hasn’t seen her family in three years. Eliot adores her big, wacky, dysfunctional collection of siblings and in-laws, but there’s a reason she fled to Manhattan and buried herself in her work—and she’s not ready to share it with anyone. Not when speaking it aloud could send her back into the never-ending cycle of the obsessive-compulsive disorder that consumed her for years. 

Eliot thinks she’s prepared to survive the four-day-long wedding extravaganza—until she sees her best friend, Manuel, waiting for her at the marina and looking as handsome as ever. He was the person who, when they met as children, felt like finding the missing half of her soul. The person she tried so hard not to fall in love with… but did anyway. 

Manuel’s presence at the wedding threatens to undo the walls Eliot has built around herself. The fortress that keeps her okay. If she isn’t careful, by the end of this wedding, the whole castle might come crumbling down.

How to Hide in Plain Sight by Emma Noyes is a book that is on the harder side to define with this being partly a contemporary romance with a darker side to the topic making it more realistic fiction with a side of drama to it too. The main character in the story suffers from OCD and deals with her mental health along with dealing with her dysfunctional family so it’s not a sunny slice of romance.

Eliot Beck left her home and her family as soon as she could after high school fleeing to Manhattan where she didn’t feel as out of place among the sea of strangers as she did growing up in Canada. Eliot buried herself in her work and learned to cope with what she found out was OCD that had the thoughts in her head all wrong when she was younger.

Now three years after her departure Eliot is heading home after getting the invite to her brother’s wedding. Eliot vows that she can handle three days with her dysfunctional family and will quickly return to her safe haven in Manhattan once the wedding is over but Eliot didn’t realize her family had invited, Manuel, Eliot’s once best friend and the one person she regretted leaving behind.

How to Hide in Plain Sight by Emma Noyes is one of those books that while I wish I could rate it higher as I appreciated a lot of what the author did in the book I was left at rating this one three and half stars when it was said and done. The story is a heavy one overall but did have some more light hearted humor to it now and again as it dealt with OCD in a way I’d never read about before and I felt like I did learn a thing or two along the way. The problem though was this one felt that as long as the book was it didn’t feel finished in the end, like something was missing or needed to feel fully satisfied. While glad I’d read it I was just left wanting a bit more.

I received an advance copy from the publisher via NetGalley.

Find this book online:

Goodreads  /  Amazon

About the author:

Emma Noyes told her mother she wanted to be an author when she was six. She grew up in a suburb outside Chicago and attended Harvard University, where she studied history & literature. She started her career at a beer company, but left because she wanted to write about mermaids and witches—eventually publishing her first YA fantasy series, The Sunken City. She now lives in Chicago with her Swedish boyfriend and accident-prone Pomeranian. GUY’S GIRL is her adult debut.