{"id":7151,"date":"2018-03-27T07:09:17","date_gmt":"2018-03-27T11:09:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=7151"},"modified":"2018-03-27T07:17:23","modified_gmt":"2018-03-27T11:17:23","slug":"the-woman-in-the-window","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=7151","title":{"rendered":"*****The Woman in the Window"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Wine

photo: H Williams, creative commons license<\/p><\/div>\n

By AJ Finn — <\/strong>From the first pages of this immersive psychological thriller by newcomer AJ Finn, you\u2019re pulled into the claustrophobic world of Anna Fox, the story\u2019s first-person narrator. You don\u2019t see much of New York other than her townhouse, and by the end of the book, you may feel boxed in by its walls too.<\/p>\n

Anna is not coping well after suffering some psychological trauma that\u2019s caused the breakup of her marriage, and you eventually learn the particulars. Though she talks to husband Ed and daughter Olivia by phone, they have moved out, leaving her rattling around her Harlem townhouse alone.<\/p>\n

Before the family break-up, Anna worked as a child psychologist with children damaged by abuse, neglect, psychosis, modern life. Now she\u2019s the patient. She has developed a severe case of agoraphobia and does not\u2014cannot\u2014leave that house. Her psychiatrist and physical therapist come to her. Her groceries and drugs are delivered. She actually takes quite a few drugs, washing them down with astonishing quantities of red wine, delivered a case at a time, and lies about this dangerous practice to her doctor, husband Ed, and anyone else who asks.<\/p>\n

To amuse herself, Anna watches old black and white movies and spies on the neighborhood, using the zoom lens of her camera\u2014much better than binoculars, she claims. Soon her own situation takes on the elements of the classic noir films Gaslight<\/em> and Rear Window<\/em>. Between the drugs and the merlot, you wonder whether Anna\u2019s movie obsession is coloring her perceptions of real-life events.<\/p>\n

Although Anna is obviously both disturbed and muddled, Finn has written her with compassion and truth. Her behavior is consistent with her character and disordered state of mind, and you believe in her actions, even the brave ones almost impossibly difficult for her.<\/p>\n

Her new neighbors become aware of her spying and want her to stop. However, their teenage son befriends her. He\u2019s a little lonely living in a new city and has other unremarkable teenage woes like the adolescents she\u2019d occasionally see in her clinical practice. To him, she\u2019s a refreshingly non-judgmental conversationalist. But when Anna sees the teenager\u2019s mother murdered and accuses the husband of killing her, the family tells the police she\u2019s delusional. Noticing the profusion of empty wine bottles, they doubt her too. I thought I saw where all this was headed, but Finn has several surprises in store.<\/p>\n

Stories with unreliable narrators are a staple of the thriller genre. Sometimes the narrators know they\u2019re bending the truth to manipulate the people around them. Anna is as desperate to bring reality into focus as is everyone else around her.
\n<\/a>\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By AJ Finn — From the first pages of this immersive psychological thriller by newcomer AJ Finn, you\u2019re pulled into the claustrophobic world of Anna Fox, the story\u2019s first-person narrator. You don\u2019t see much of New York other than her … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"*****The Woman in the Window - as popular as Gone Girl or The Girl on the Train - immersive psychological thriller! This gal has watched too much noir through a haze of merlot and pills.","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[52,366,126,32],"tags":[1283,91,472,392,1284],"class_list":["post-7151","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-crime","category-drama","category-reading-2","category-thriller","tag-a-j-finn","tag-new-york","tag-noir","tag-psychological-thriller","tag-the-woman-in-the-window"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-1Rl","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7151","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7151"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7151\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7155,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7151\/revisions\/7155"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7151"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7151"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7151"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}