Abbott excels in evoking the strange mix of camaraderie and rivalry that exists in academic research, showing the links forged by long hours and proximity as well as the suspicion and desperation that grow like a bacterial culture in competitive environments ... Female friendship and ambition are threaded throughout her work, and here they form a rich tapestry, as she contrasts the 'now' of Kit’s professional life as a postdoc in Dr. Severin’s lab with the 'then' of her high school relationship with Diane ... Ultimately, though, the reason to read this compelling and hypnotic novel is not the execution of the plot or the sleight-of-hand final revelation. What makes it stand out is Abbott’s expert dissection of women’s friendships and rivalries. She is an investigator of the human heart and mind, and Give Me Your Hand is a fine addition to her body of work—one that should cement her position as one of the most intelligent and daring novelists working in the crime genre today.
Wryly is the only way cliches ever slip into Abbott’s prose. She can write up a storm, weaving spell after spell out of the jangle and dross of middle America, its Flying Js and Cinnabons, cherry slush and drag races under the viaduct. An affection for these details, an abhorrence of condescension, pulses through the novel, which is devastatingly canny about gender relations. It’s also as suspenseful as any best-seller you’d care to name, and as sad.
This novel, instead, explores what characters who have been beaten down and confined by sexism might be capable of. Abbott tempts us to read her tale as a study in what happens when female revenge overflows its bounds, when female rage rises up like a ghost out of the earth ... The femme fatale, like the Dead Girl, traditionally functioned as a cipher, a scrim for misogynist fantasies. Abbott’s fiction hungers for more complex versions of these old types ... At times, though, Abbott mistakes reproducing noir myths of femininity for subverting them.
Give Me Your Hand steadily intensifies its atmosphere of claustrophobia to the point of constriction. Indeed, this macabre story makes Edgar Allan Poe’s 'The Pit and the Pendulum,' (the granddaddy of all 'walls-closing-in' tales) seem as airy and expansive as the Grand Canyon ... Abbott deliciously draws out tension by hopping back and forth in time, slowly disclosing Diane’s skeleton-in-the-closet while divulging Kit’s moral failings that will inadvertently add to the body count ... Give Me Your Hand, like so many of Abbott’s disturbing tales, dramatizes the adage, 'Be careful what you wish for.'
Abbott’s characters speak in pithy, clipped sentences. They make doomy proclamations that tell the reader that something important and scary is coming ... Abbott writes high school well, and her alternating then/now chapters balance teenage perception and identity with the extreme competition of the adult scientific world ... Diane’s secret and the lengths she’ll go to cover it up are predictable. The subtlety of Give Me Your Hand lies in the nuance of the women’s relationship: how, particularly in our teenage years, those we idolize can be bad for us yet also push us to our greatest heights. Friendship can be both a poison and a tonic.
Once again, Abbott...plunges us deep into a vividly realized world of intense competition and creates life-or-death stakes where we wouldn’t have known to look for them ... Procedural fans may have a few nitpicks, but this is a brilliant riff on hard science, human nature, and the ultimate unknowability of the human brain.
Abbott has once again gifted her audience with a remarkably unreliable narrator, in this case a woman whose single-minded focus on professional success blinds her to real danger, and vital truths ... Give Me Your Hand sees heads aflame, more than once. The best part of this slow-burning novel is that just when you think you've seen the explosion, another one happens — and you definitely won't guess the last, no matter what foreshadowing exists.
In Give Me Your Hand, author Megan Abbott turns to the dark side of friendship and ambition with an intriguing story about two women scientists vying to conduct groundbreaking work in a pressure cooker of a research lab. Abbott infuses just enough science to boost her novel without overwhelming it. The lab is a metaphor for any demanding workplace such as a law firm, a hospital or a newspaper ... Abbott strongly dissects obsessions that easily morph into destruction and aspirations that spiral into blind ambition. The personalities of Diane and Kit are manifested through their work ... Abbott again shows why she’s one of our best story tellers.
The high school portion is compelling throughout, showing the brutal class divides that keep people with the same potential from realizing similar results ... One downside of this friendship is that the secret that drove the two of them apart stays hidden for too long, made worse by the somewhat tedious nature of the book’s first third ... Abbott is at her best when delving into the darker places of women’s psyches ... Throughout it all, Abbott keeps readers off guard with unsettling scenes of death, and perhaps even more disturbing inner monologues. From a high school senior’s tiny bedroom to a clean and orderly lab, Abbott can bring horror anywhere.
Megan Abbott proves she’s still the queen of uncovering the dark complexity of the female psyche with her new novel ... It uses all the strengths she’s known for and gives them more room to develop ... Give Me Your Hand is not likely to elicit the sparks of psychic recognition Abbott’s fans have come to expect from her books; the situation is too specific, the personalities far from archetypical ... It’s an unexpected thrill to see Abbott’s themes played out over the course of a dozen or so years ... This is a book that haunts, that demands a reread to chew through all of its layers.
...[a] fiery new novel ... Give Me Your Hand could have been a standard-issue peek into the secret lives of American teenagers—the usual chaos and drama and hormones, just with higher stakes and body counts. But it’s much more than that. By springing forward into Kit and Diane’s adult lives and fleshing out the messy psychological ramifications of decade-plus-old traumas, she digs into the gravitas of adolescent emotional wounds ... Abbott’s earlier novels are mostly structured as typical whodunits. But in Give Me Your Hand, we know both the crime and the perpetrator early on. There’s nothing to solve. Instead, it’s a slower-paced Match Point–esque anxiety fest, a caustic nightmare about our youthful bad decisions.
Megan Abbott isn’t afraid of a little blood. Her new thriller, Give Me Your Hand, is soaked in it ... But Abbott isn’t just any crime writer. She earned a Ph.D. from New York University studying noir literature and has built a blockbuster career subverting the genre’s tropes ... Abbott couldn’t resist the idea of a condition that could be both an explanation for bad behavior and an excuse that ignores the complexity of female killers. She masterfully mines that gray area to build tension ... Abbott’s talent lies in dissecting the complicated tension between women at any age.
Give Me Your Hand is a finely crafted story of obsession ... Give Me Your Hand, Megan Abbott’s ninth novel, is more than a gripping story. The writing is of a quality not often seen in commercial fiction, full of evocative phrases that transform the everyday to the poetic ... Her prose has the vividness of cinema ... Abbott gives a powerful sense of the lab atmosphere ... Kit and Diane are richly drawn, complex characters ... For all Abbott’s skill at storytelling and layered characterisation, it’s no spoiler to say...Diane’s secret is well flagged and turns out to be rather obvious. So, in the middle of the story, when the narrative starts to lag, Abbott drops in a shocking, unexpected event to further heighten the stakes.
In Give Me Your Hand, author Megan Abbott turns to the dark side of friendship and ambition with an intriguing story about two women scientists vying to conduct groundbreaking work in a pressure cooker of a research lab. Abbott infuses just enough science to boost her novel without overwhelming it ... In Give Me Your Hand, Abbott again shows why she's one of our best story tellers.
Give Me Your Hand, Abbott’s newest novel, places reproductive systems at its center, but not in the way we’re used to seeing them addressed. Instead of the womb’s power to create life, the novel examines its more painful aspects in the form of scientific research into premenstrual dysphoric disorder or PMDD ... The novel is, as all of Abbott’s books are, thoroughly emotional and full of intellectual fodder to parse out while also remaining an intensely readable page-turner.
Though more of a slow burn than her last novel (You Will Know Me), Megan Abbott once again dials up the heat, delivering a heart-pounding thriller that touches on a number of issues women face, including career ambitions, disadvantages in the workplace, and, of course, friendship. Her unvarnished approach is real, raw, and honest, giving readers plenty to think about moving forward ... Give Me Your Hand is another winner from Megan Abbott, who continues to pump out one blockbuster after another while showing no signs of slowing down any time soon.
Abbott...has made the dark desires and secrets of the female psyche the life force of her novels ... In Abbott’s deft hands, friendship is fused to rivalry, and ambition to fear, with an unsettling level of believability. It will take more than a cold shower to still the blood thumping in your ears when you finish this.
When Diane’s secret pulses to the surface, lives are lost and futures are put in doubt in a mad rush to keep the past in its place. No writer can touch Abbott in the realm of twisted desire and relationships between women, both intimate and feral.
