Book Review: You’re Invited | Amanda Jayatissa

I completely loved Amanda Jayatissa’s debut psychological thriller My Sweet Girl so I basically purchased her next novel You’re Invited without a second thought. The stories are different but bring Jayatissa’s same Sri Lankan roots and culture to the forefront of the mystery. This time, it revolves around high society, filthy rich Sri Lankan families and a wedding that could put even the most opulent American weddings to shame.

In You’re Invited, a woman finds out her former best friend is marrying her ex-boyfriend and decides to go to the wedding to resolve things. Can you imagine attending the wedding between your ex and your former best friend? That would be a hard no from me, but that partly what made this story so fascinating from the very first page!

About the Book | You’re Invited

Amaya Bloom finds comfort and peace in living her life in a very controlled way. She is a believer in the symbolism and power of certain numbers, and uses those to make decisions and guide her life forward.

When she receives an invitation to her former best friend Kaavi’s opulent and over-the-top wedding in Sri Lanka, she is surprised. Kaavi and Amaya haven’t spoken for many years, though Amaya has kept up with Kaavi through an anonymous social media account she uses to follow her. And Kaavi loves to share her glamorous life, so she doesn’t exactly make it difficult.

But the invitation is even stranger because not only are Kaavi and Amaya estranged, Kaavi is marrying Amaya’s ex-boyfriend Matthew Spencer. Amaya knows she must attend and stop the wedding from happening, no matter what it takes.

But as the week-long wedding festivities begin, rumors about Amaya swirl and she can’t help feeling like she has a target on her back. When Kaavi then goes missing, all evidence makes it seem as though Amaya is to blame.

But Amaya isn’t the only wedding guest with secrets… What happened to Kaavi and who is responsible?

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Review | You’re Invited

Having read two books by Jayatissa, she has shown herself to be an expert at weaving together a past and present storyline that seem to exist on different stratospheres. In reading the current events of her books, and knowing what we do about the past of the characters, it’s almost impossible to piece together how exactly they got so far from where they started.

In her prior book, My Sweet Girl, this was done through the events at an orphanage in Sri Lanka and the adult life of the main character who is now wealthy, spoiled, and living in America and spiraling completely out of control.

In You’re Invited, the timelines don’t move nearly as far back, but the questions and mysteries about what is going on all lie in the decades leading up to the main storyline. How did Amaya and Kaavi’s friendship fall apart? When did Kaavi and Spencer get together? What happened the last time Amaya was in Colombo? So many questions!

Amaya is a character that readers may have a hard time understanding at first. She is clearly suffering anxiety and finds signs, symbols, and atypical treatments to manage it. Though the number symbolism helps her at times, at others it is debilitating. She is also obsessed with her former best friend—stalking her social media using fake accounts and commenting on everything she posts, while simultaneously spiraling about how fake her online persona is. She also seems to punish herself. And something clearly is unresolved from her past in relation so her family.

At the same time, she quickly turned from vapid and a bit unhinged to sympathetic and compelling in my eyes. She still seemed unwell, but it became the sort of situation where I started to see her strength in coming to this wedding, rather than as a crazy stalker who jumped at the chance to see Kaavi.

“No one seems to understand that real loss never eases; we just become more adept at carrying a weight that settles deeper in our chests, smiling through it, pretending like we are totally fine whenever someone mentions them.”

In both books I read by Jayatissa, I loved learning more about Sri Lankan culture. The entire extravagant wedding festivities were fascinating in this book! I also found it interesting to learn more about wealth in Colombo and the relationship between families and their servants, as well as the mix of tradition and modern opulence.

The twists were a real mind-bender! A lot goes on and everything was turned on it’s head. In the second half of the book we get Kaavi’s perspective on things, but I didn’t really understand exactly what had happened until the very final twisted chapter. An absolutely wild read!

Check out the book club guide from the author on her website!

Other Books You Might Like

The obvious recommendation if you liked this book–from the thrills and twists to the Sri Lankan culture–is to go back and read Jayatissa’s first book My Sweet Girl, which I absolutely loved! Another book that blended a dark mystery, family full of secrets, and traditional versus modern culture is Quiet in Her Bones by Nalini Singh. That family is seriously twisted and it features another fragile lead who I was never quite sure was a reliable narrator.

If the idea of a story that tells the timeline pre- and post- an unexpected disappearance to help you piece together clues about what may have happened, I would recommend reading Wendy Walker’s The Night Before. If the social media stalking aspect intrigues you, Kathleen Barber’s Follow Me will deliver that salacious look at the potential dark side of oversharing on social media.

About the Author | Amanda Jayatissa

Amanda Jayatissa loves to read disturbing books with shocking plot twists, so it seemed logical to her that she should attempt to write disturbing books with shocking plot twists. When she isn’t recovering from a self-induced book hangover, she works tirelessly as the chief taste tester at the cookie shop she co-owns.

She grew up in Sri Lanka and has lived in the California bay area and British countryside, before relocating back to her sunny island, where she lives with her husband and two Tasmanian-devil-reincarnate huskies.