‘Not technically a thriller (though I’m always wary of hard genre definitions), this book certainly has many of the hallmarks of one. There are threatening notes pinned to pets’ litter boxes, a getaway car and an urgently ticking clock as Zoe tries, over the course of a single day, to escape the marriage in which she’s been effectively imprisoned for two decades.

Spliced with the claustrophobic contemporary drama are flashbacks to the genesis of Zoe’s relationship with her wife, Penny, at which many red flags were visible but colored perhaps by the very same rose-tinted spectacles that grace the book’s glorious cover. We are privy to the gaslighting and coercion that have been the hallmarks of their marriage and the monstrous control that Penny has exerted over Zoe’s life, co-opting neighbors, family members and even Zoe herself as foot soldiers in her reign of terror.

By turns comic, sinister and affecting, this is a brilliant examination of the self-delusion and domestic power play at the heart of a truly dysfunctional union’

— Lucy Foley, The New York Times