NetGalley ARC | You Did Nothing Wrong

I received a free digital ARC from the publisher viw NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Rating | ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

Sweet baby Jesus.

I don't even know how to properly explain why being gaslit for a few hundred pages was totally okay because this book is phenomenal.

Elodie's life is perfect. After having a baby at sixteen, she later meets Bren. There's a whirlwind relationship that culminates in their marriage and relocation to Bren's old family home that is in dire need of serious help. Bren insists on doing all the work himself as Elodie cares for her autistic son Jude and is pregnant with her second child.

But ever so slowly, things start to go wrong. Jude's behaviors explode and Elodie does her best to control him, to keep him from destroying their new life. She won't accept help, all but denies he has autism, and tries to hold everything together. But he continues to escalate, claiming the house doesn't want the renovations, that all the fixing up is hurting the house, the voices in the walls are telling him this.

Drews weaves the story slowly at first, taking care to show how this new little family functions together in this new setting. This is supposed to be the beginning of their perfect life and Elodie wants to hold it together. It's easy to have loads of sympathy for Elodie, a very young mother to a a six-year-old who she so desperately just wants to love. Bren seems oblivious at first to Jude's behavior, so focused on amking the house livable for the, and the new baby on its way. But there's something more to Bren and the all-consuming love he and Elodie have for one another.

This book is genuinely suffocating, but I could not put it down. The whole time I was reading, it felt like the walls were closing in. I'm not normally claustrophobic, but this made me so uncomfortable I had to walk around while reading for a while, no joke. Yet I read it in nearly on sitting because I had to know what was happening. Is the house really talking to Jude? Is Bren the true cause of all the strange happenings? Is Elodie my favorite kind of narrator: unreliable?

Outwardly Elodie constantly strives to be the very best she can be within her new life. She will be a good wife to Bren and a good mother to Jude. Everyone will see her be the best version of herself, despite the fact that on the inside she is completely falling apart. She's so determined to deny that anything is "wrong" with Jude and tries everything she can think of to calm her often inconsolable child, that it's easy to scream at her to open her fucking eyes and stop with the charade.

I admit it took a while for me to figure out what was really going on. And not because this is one of those books that just throws a random curveball to throw readers off. No, everything I needed to know was right in front of me. But I would get so caught up in Elodie and Jude's immediate episode that I would forget everything I already learned. Once I realized what was coming though, it was like a light came on and the answer was barrelling toward me at 100 mph.

Obviously I did not get out of the way. I couldn't. I was far too invested.

I spent a lot of the novel incredibly angry after my epiphany, but also helpless because there was nothing I could do to stop what I felt sure was coming.

The title is ironic then, because in the end Elodie did literally every possible thing wrong.

Highly, highly recommended.