You First – A Joe Goldberg Prequel

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Description
Joe Goldberg is ready for his life to start. He’s seventeen years old, working in Mr. Mooney’s bookshop, falling in love with every girl on the subway all while wondering who will be the one. He knows what he needs: A woman who will force him to get his GED, go to night school, and make something of himself. But who would ever fall in love with him?

Then he spots it: MISSED CONNECTION, NYC Bookstore Babe.

Someone is looking for Joe. And that someone is Vail Gunderson, a production assistant with a passion for rom-coms. The only catch: she’s twenty-four, which means that Joe has no choice but to lie about his age…and, naturally, nearly everything else in his life. Joe thinks he’s found true love, but when Vail needs more convincing that Joe is her happily ever after, he’s determined to convince her…no matter what it takes…

With her incisive and darkly comedic prose, Caroline Kepnes captures Joe poised on the edge of manhood, entering the vicious, dog-eat-dog New York dating scene for the very first time, and buffeted by forces that will determine what kind of man he will become—and how he will write his own twisted love story.

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Awards
N/A Pending Release

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Review 

You First offers something the You series has never quite given us before: Joe Goldberg before he fully became Joe Goldberg.

Kepnes captures him in that raw, ungainly stretch of adolescence where the wounds are still fresh and the armor hasn’t fully hardened yet, and she does it with the same darkly precise prose that made the original series so compulsively readable.

What makes this book so effective is how viscerally you feel the experiences that shape him. The pain isn’t distant or clinical. It lands close enough to recognize, because Kepnes grounds Joe’s formation in the universal awkwardness of trying to figure out who you are while the world keeps telling you who you aren’t. 

His intelligence, which will eventually become something almost predatory in later books, reads here more like a survival mechanism—armor against the fear that the monsters around him have already won, that he might already be one of them.

As a fan of the series, seeing the origin of Joe’s obsessive romantic logic through the Vail storyline is both fascinating and quietly unsettling in the best way. Kepnes earns the darkness because she never lets you forget the boy underneath it.

A compulsively readable, character-rich prequel that rewards fans of the series while standing solidly on its own. 4 out of 5 stars.

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