DNF Review: You Know What You Have to Do

Book: You Know What You Have To Do by Bonnie Shimko
Publication Date: March 26, 2013
Series: None
Rating: DNF

Synopsis: This quirky, appealing YA novel turns formulaic teen fiction on its head as funny, feisty fifteen year-old Mary-Magdalene Feigenbaum (otherwise known as Maggie) suddenly faces more than the usual typical YA concerns: a voice in her head that is telling her to kill people. Not just anyone—each time the target is someone who has done something terrible to a person Maggie cares for. You know what you have to do, the voice commands. Maggie struggles to resist, but the voice is relentless.

With rising suspense, this story of psychological horror introduces a narrator whose own unique voice and irreverent humor are unforgettable—an unlikely hero fighting a desperate battle against incomprehensible evil.

**This review may contain some spoilers. Read at your own risk!!*

It had a really good premise, and the synopsis for it really caught my interest, but things just fell way too flat for me. In the very beginning of You Know What You Have to Do things are very exciting and we get to learn and see a lot of Maggie's "inner voice", see the bad things this voice made her do, but after the first 25 pages or so when things are really exciting it all of a sudden stops. Now instead of dealing with this voice, Maggie now worries about this new kid that she's obsessed with all of a sudden. Literally, all of a sudden. One minute she was too concerned about having that voice in her head and how she should stay away from people at all cost, the next she didn't even worry about it and was instead more interested in this random guy she only knew the name of. It completely threw me this sudden and quite frankly, boring, turn of events in the book. There was literally nothing of interest going on except for Maggie complaining or jumping to conclusions or complaining some more. I eventually just said, "Forget this." and stopped reading. I called it quits on this and didn't look back.

Maggie was such a terrible character, truly. She was selfish beyond belief, only ever thinking of herself and what she wanted yet getting mad at others for either being selfish themselves or for not thinking about her. She was very mean as well. She never had anything nice to say about anyone or anything, not even her best and only friend. It angered me so much how badly she treated her friend. She jumped to conclusions all the time. She went to therapy, not for her inner voice but for night terrors, and when she heard that somebody else heard voices she immediately thought they were the exact same as her and perhaps their voice was even more evil than hers. That wasn't true, of course, but she thought it for a long time and twisted everything the other person said to fit into her own little world. When her friend was no longer "frog faced" as she liked to call her, and suddenly became pretty, Maggie kept thinking that her friend would suddenly be popular and have all these things and go all these places with other people. It annoyed me how wrong she was, yet how she always thought she was right. She wasn't witty, sarcastic, or a diamond in the rough heroine like I was expecting. She was a mean, selfish, vain, jerk who jumped to conclusions on everything!

To be quite honest with you I was pretty annoyed and bored with the story since page one, even when things were getting exciting, so I barely made 100 pages before I decided to quit. It had great premise and sounded so good, but it fell so flat and wasn't even close to what I was hoping for. I was very disappointed with how You Know What You Have To Do turned out and I won't be picking it up again, even to try and see if it gets better later on in the book. I would not recommend this book to anyone unfortunately. The synopsis described a book that was simply not this, and I could not be more disappointed.


~Kayla~