Everyone is Watching – Heather Gudenkauf

Summary

The Best Friend. The Confidant. The Senator. The Boyfriend. The Executive.

Five contestants have been chosen to compete for ten million dollars on the game show One Lucky Winner. The catch? None of them knows what (or who) to expect, and it will be live streamed all over the world. Completely secluded in an estate in Northern California, with strict instructions not to leave the property and zero contact with the outside world, the competitors start to feel a little too isolated.

When long-kept secrets begin to rise to the surface, the contestants realize this is no longer just a reality show—someone is out for blood. And the game can’t end until the world knows who the contestants really are…

Review

I have so many mixed feelings! First of all, I loved this cover, but after reading the book, I don’t exactly feel like it fits the story; it gives off a creepier vibe than what it is.

I’ve started to make a habit of first pointing out what I didn’t like and then what I did like, but I will combine “good” and “bad” aspects alike because my reception of this book is so mixed.

Even though I prefer first-person narration, I actually flowed with the third-person past tense in here. This just speaks volumes about Gudenkauf’s writing, one of the strongest, if not the strongest, points of the book. Thinking about it again, perhaps I would have finished kind of annoyed if it wasn’t for such an excellent writing flow and prose.

The story had so much potential, we have Maire (the best friend), Camille (The Confidante), Samuel (the boyfriend), Ned (the executive), Senator Crowley, Cat (the producer), and Fern (the assistant). Maybe because I have experience with wide casts of characters but they were easy to follow and was majorly able to distinguish each of their voices, except for some of the men in the beginning, as well.

It is quite fast to realise that everyone is there for a reason, and the major clue that confirms us (and the characters) this was so cool, but so underutilised. Felt like everyone, including the author, forgot about this detail until it was time to wrap up the last 5% of the book.

Because there’s a reason for everyone having been cherry-picked to be in the contest, we get a couple of chapters from the past featuring Sam and Maire, delving into their shared history and their sin that made them end up in One Lucky Winner, at first obviously you are intrigued but it ended up being such a let down for so much build up!

I guess that sums up my feelings, great concept, great writing and an almost great execution, just unfortunately some of the plot choices were such let downs that Everyone is Watching ends up with a 3 star rating.

Click for spoilers!

Cat was Lina, Maire’s former best friend from college, who was dying and decided to arrange the whole contest to bring everyone that wronged her and get revenge.

Maire’s and Samuel’s secret was that while playing, they caused a car crash where a man died and of their friends figured out what happened but promised to stay silent, however he ended up telling everything to Lina years later, including that Samuel and Marie kissed that night.

The senator got Cat fired in her journalism beginnings because she found out real dirt on him, Camille was evading taxes and caused the death of one of her patients and Cat was threatening her with this because Camille was Cat’s marriage counsellor, and Cat blamed her because of her divorce. Ned was a serial sexual predator who assaulted both Cat and Fern in the past.

Ned and Cat die from a fall in the very last minutes of production.

In the end, the real one lucky winner was Fern, who inherited everything from Cat and gave 1M to Marie for her daughter’s medical bills.