This is one of the most powerful novels I’ve read in a long while. Eliot struggles with OCD after losing her brother at a young age. The ways in which this illness impacts her cause her to feel she must distance herself from her family and her best friend, Manuel. How to Hide in Plain Site picks up three years after Eliot has moved to New York and she’s returning to her family’s island for her older brother’s wedding. She’s got to face her family, the possibility of returning OCD symptoms, and worst of all, the best friend she cut off three years ago.
Noyes did an amazing job sharing Eliot’s OCD and how she battles with it internally. The novel flashes back and forth between past and present, so readers see Eliot as she first begins to struggle with OCD thoughts as well as her then her continued present-day coping strategies. The writing is beautiful and the characters are easy to love and root for. This is, by far, one of the best books I’ve read this year.
ABOUT THE BOOK
The unbreakable bonds of family and love are explored in this brilliant and tender story from the author of Guy’s Girl.
On the day she arrives in Canada for her older brother’s wedding, Eliot Beck hasn’t seen her family in three years. Eliot adores her big, wacky, dysfunctional collection of siblings and in-laws, but there’s a reason she fled to Manhattan and buried herself in her work—and she’s not ready to share it with anyone. Not when speaking it aloud could send her back into the never-ending cycle of the obsessive-compulsive disorder that consumed her for years.
Eliot thinks she’s prepared to survive the four-day-long wedding extravaganza—until she sees her best friend, Manuel, waiting for her at the marina and looking as handsome as ever. He was the person who, when they met as children, felt like finding the missing half of her soul. The person she tried so hard not to fall in love with… but did anyway.
Manuel’s presence at the wedding threatens to undo the walls Eliot has built around herself. The fortress that keeps her okay. If she isn’t careful, by the end of this wedding, the whole castle might come crumbling down
