You'll Thank Me for This
A Novel
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3.6 • 14 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
A pulse-pounding psychological thriller based on the popular Dutch tradition of blindfolding and dropping teens and pre-teens in the middle of a forest — and what happens when it goes horribly wrong.
Twelve-year old Karin is blindfolded and dropped into the Hoge Veluwe National Forest with three other children. With nothing but a few basic supplies and emergency food, the children are tasked with working together to navigate one of the Netherlands' most beautiful and wild locations and return to where their families are anxiously waiting.
Karin quickly finds herself at odds with two of the older teens, and suddenly looks up to see that the other children have vanished. As Karin struggles against the elements to find her way back, she soon realizes that something far more sinister lurks in the woods.
Grace, Karin’s mother and an American married to a Dutch husband, has been nervous about this practice from the start. At first she tells herself the space is good for her daughter, but as the hours begin to tick by and the children fail to arrive at their designated campsite, she becomes certain something has gone horribly wrong.
As Karin fights for survival, and Grace hastens to find her daughter, the night culminates in the reveal of a deadly secret—and a shocking confrontation—that will push each of them to her edge.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
You may never go into the woods again after reading this bone-chilling thriller about a Dutch kid who embarks on one extreme scouting trip. After a group of blindfolded children are led into the wilderness to find their own way back with no help from adults, 12-year-old Karin gets separated from the group. She’s pursued by wild animals, a gang of possibly inhuman ghouls, and a mysterious stalker with a disturbing agenda. Nina Siegal really knows how to keep the suspense simmering, ratcheting it up so that we felt desperately invested in Karin’s survival. Siegal’s hyper-real descriptions of the sights, sounds, and smells of a cold, eerie forest made us feel like we were going through this dark adventure alongside her young heroine. Based on a real tradition for Dutch children (yikes!), You’ll Thank Me for This will make you terrified of your own backyard, much less a strange wilderness.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Karin, the 12-year-old heroine of this suspenseful psychological thriller set in the Netherlands from Siegal (The Anatomy Lesson), still struggles to accept her stepfather, Martijn, two years after her photojournalist father, Pieter, was fatally shot by a sniper while on assignment in Syria. With Martijn and her mother constantly fighting, Karin welcomes all the more her first dropping, the Dutch tradition of blindfolding and leaving groups of teens and preteens in the middle of a national forest to test their abilities to work as a team and survive in extreme circumstances. Grouped with two lovestruck teens who take off on their own and a shy girl her age who disappears, Karin remains confident on her own, since she's been dropped in the area where she and Pieter used to hike and camp. The tension rises when she realizes she's lost and being stalked, and the forest she knew so well begins to seems menacing, forcing her to draw on her experiences with her father to survive. Three-dimensional characters match the clever plotting. Siegal knows how to keep the pages turning.
