The Woman in the Window

The book I read during the second quarter was The Woman in the Window by A.J. Finn. This novel was filled with multiple twists and turns that were shocking each time I turned to a new page.  As interesting the plot of the book is, the characters are even more so. The main character, Anna Fox is a psychologist who helps patients dealing with agoraphobia; which is the fear of going outside. Ironically, Anna communicates with these patients through the computer because she too has this fear. She developed this fear from a horrible car accident she experienced with her husband and daughter.  Through out the book her fear unravels the deep effects it has had on her personality.  Due to the incident, she began to have imaginary conversations with her deceased husband and daughter in order to cope with that fact that they died in the car crash. Anna's habit of having these false conversations and believing that her family is alive completely changes the dynamic of the book. Because the conversations she has seems so real, Anna portrays herself as a plausible witness to the murder she saw in front of her neighbor's house. However, once this habit of her's if revealed she sets the book off balance and is seen as unreliable. Towards the end of the book Anna accepts the fact that the way she is coping with the deaths is wrong, yet she still stands firm with the events of the murder she witnessed. While all of these events were happening, Anna still had the nerve to try and help her teenage neighbor, Ethan. She found him to be very interesting and used her psychology skills to try and diagnose him. In the end he turned out to be dangerously manipulative and tricked Anna to thinking that he was a nervous/shy boy. Ethan also plays a role in Anna's psychological mixup and in the novel all together. Astonishingly, I did not favor Anna at all in the beginning of the book. I thought of her as someone who was only making matters worse for herself. It was not until the middle and end of the book that her character started to grow on me. It was the way she believed so strongly in what she saw despite her unstable perspective on reality.