Stars: 2.5 out of 5.
I was excited to read this book, but ultimately came away disappointed. My biggest issue was that I didn’t like any of the characters. Nearly everyone felt awful, selfish, and deeply self-centered, which made it difficult to become invested in their struggles or relationships.
Unfortunately, that included Rowena, our protagonist and the person we’re clearly meant to empathize with. While it’s undeniable that she is being gaslighted by her husband and subjected to subtle emotional abuse, I still found her frustratingly difficult to root for.
Rowena is painfully aware of her anxiety, depression, and extreme clinginess, yet she seems unwilling to take any meaningful steps toward helping herself. Instead, she passively accepts whatever her husband tells her to do—take this medication, see this psychiatrist, follow this advice—without ever questioning it or seeking independent help. I found it hard to believe that someone who had lived in California for six months hadn’t made any effort to establish her own support network, find a primary care doctor, or even choose her own therapist.
What bothered me most was the contradiction in her behavior. For much of the novel, she drifts through life in an almost helpless state, blindly following her husband’s lead. Yet whenever she discovers one of his lies, she swings to the opposite extreme, becoming intensely paranoid, suspicious, and vindictive. Rather than making her feel complex, these shifts made her feel inconsistent and difficult to understand.
My other issue with Rowena was her relationship with Sara. Rowena repeatedly insists that she loves her husband, but she seems immediately captivated by Sara almost from the moment they meet. Given that both women are married, this felt strange to me, especially since Sara never appeared to show any interest in being anything more than a friend. This didn’t make me like Rowena any more.
While I sympathized with the situation she found herself in at the end—isolated and unable to turn to her mother or best friend for help because her husband had already convinced them that she was unstable, depressed, and suicidal—I could not support the decision she ultimately made. She committed a crime and took a life. Rather than facing the consequences of her actions, she chose to run away. What made that choice even more frustrating was that she did so on the advice of a machine that she knew had been designed with a built-in bias toward viewing her husband as a threat.
I’m also not convinced that the ending is as happy as it seems. On one hand, Rowena escapes punishment and gets to live freely with her daughter. On the other hand, she can never return home or reconnect with the friends she left behind. She has effectively abducted her child and is now living as a fugitive. Worse, she has placed herself entirely at the mercy of a machine whose guidance she unquestioningly follows. To me, that feels less like a happy ending and more like a nightmare masquerading as one.
On a side note, I am not sure why the author chose to change the title from Amen Maxine to The Prediction. The original title was attention-grabbing. The new name is just… meh.
PS: My thanks to NetGalley for providing me with a review copy.