Book Review: The Date | Louise Jensen

Louise Jensen’s The Date is an absolute must-read book this year!!! I saw this book described as living in a nightmare, and I couldn’t say it better. This book got into my head! I found myself walking down the street and imagining what it would be like to have no idea whether the strangers passing me were people I know. Whether one of those people may hate me and wish me harm, but I wasn’t able to read that emotion on their face. A chilling, gripping, anxiety-inducing page-turner that has a shocking twist!!

About the Book

Ali is having a normal Saturday night for a single girl. She gets ready for the evening with her roommate, trying on outfits before deciding on her green dress. She does her hair and her make up. They head to the bar to meet her blind date. Ali is ready to start living a bit since the end of her marriage, and this is her first big step towards taking back her life.

But then Ali wakes up on Sunday morning with blood on her hands and no memory of the night before. What happened to her after she arrived at the bar? Was she drugged? Why is her head throbbing? And then she goes in the bathroom to wash up, only to discover the nightmare she is now living in… Ali can’t recognize her own face.

As Ali seeks answers, the nightmare only gets worse. Ali isn’t just having trouble recognizing herself, she can’t recognize any faces. And worse, someone seems to know what happened that night and they aren’t letting Ali forget it. What do you do when you’re being stalked by someone you can’t recognize?? Will Ali’s past finally catch up to her?

Reflection

This is quite possible the most unique premise for a thriller that I’ve read in 2018. Of course as a doctoral student in psychology, I’ve heard of prosopagnosia. It’s a condition resulting from trauma or damage to the fusiform gyrus in your brains, which is the part of the brain responsible for processing and encoding faces.  There’s a broader area right there called the Inferior Temporal Gyrus and it is actually responsible for all visual object recognition. Damage to that area is incredibly sad, because it impacts processing of visual information so much. In fact, if you’re interested you should look up the famous case that really brought this condition into the forefront of psychology, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat.

But I digress.

I actually can’t even imagine how scary this would be to live with! Jensen uses this very real condition to create a twisted web of terror encompassing Ali. At any moment, Ali has no clue whether she knows her stalker, whether she would recognize them without this condition, or even whether her stalker is a male or female. Imagine if every face you saw could be the person who is trying to destroy your life, but you’d have no idea! There were a few scenes in this that literally gave me goosebumps imagining how scared Ali must be!

I loved the way Jensen went not only into the terror Ali felt at her situation, but also into the other life implications of living with prosopagnosia. At one point, Ali mentions that her doctor told her that developing social anxiety is incredibly common with prosopagnosia, because the individual worries that they aren’t recognizing someone they should and that they may not read emotions from people correctly and could respond inappropriately. This was such a great addition to the novel. It made me think outside of this thriller about what it would be like to live with prosopagnosia day in and out.

I read this as a Traveling Sisters read with Brenda, Norma, and Berit. Overall we loved it and had an amazing experience reading and discussing this one together! I am so excited by how well Louise Jensen is doing as a fairly new author, and I can’t wait to see what she comes out with next.