The Woman in the Window Review

The Woman in the Window, by A.J. Finn, follows Anna Fox, a woman who recently underwent a traumatic event and now suffers from severe agoraphobia. While stuck in her home she witnesses a crime happen in one of her neighbor's houses, but isn't sure she can even believe her own recollection of what happened and desperately tries to figure out what she witnessed.

I'll get this out of the way: I don't understand why this book became the hit that it did. It's not a terrible novel by any means, but I fail to see what made it so exceptional to so many. While the character of Anna Fox is great - I eagerly await the movie to see how Amy Adams portrays the her - so much of what happens requires more than just the suspension of belief. I won't go into details to avoid spoilers, but the 'reveal' was only a surprise because of how implausible it was for them to do what they did.

And I don't mean in a 'Oh, that's fairly unlikely to happen' type of way: I mean the sheer amount of narrative and character leaps that Finn asks the readers to make is extraordinary. He very easily could've leaned into Anna's unreliability due to the medicine she takes and her frequent mixing of them with alcohol to surprise the reader with misinterpretations on Anna's part, but instead opts to make her a much more reliable narrator than needed.

And by making sure that Anna is, in fact, a fairly reliable narrator (not everything can be taken at face value with her, so as not to spoil too much), it makes the ultimate reveal of what she really witnessed towards the end of the book - and the circumstances surrounding the climax - feel unearned. By making her too credible, it makes the situations around her too incredible. Finn needed to make her slightly more imperfect (and the resolution slightly less tidy) in order for it to feel like a proper payoff.

Which is a shame, because the character of Anna Fox is great. There's so much character there - grief mixed with guilt, pride mixed with fragility. In a stronger narrative, this would be the type of character that would inspire a thousand different readings and interpretations. On the other hand, Finn leaves almost every other character either underdeveloped or barely developed enough. The neighbors involved in what she witnessed are probably the best written, and there's far too much left unseen and unsaid with them for their ultimate resolution to be satisfying.

Structurally, the story does something that I absolutely hate: hides a major detail of a character (in this case, Anna) that we should know far earlier than we do. There's no reason to deprive the reader of this information - anyone with the slightest bit of intelligence knows the Something Important happened that we aren't privy to - other than for one of several 'reveals' that only serve to prolong the story. And this particular reveal doesn't really change the trajectory of the story, so it feels even more unnecessary.

It's isn't a bad book, it's just an unfulfilling one. The heaps of praise it received confuse me, as it doesn't do anything particularly new with this genre, and the ending in particular doesn't quite come together as well as it could.

Solid and unspectacular.

3 out of 5