BLACKOUT | Erin Flanagan
07.01.2022 | Thomas & Mercer
Rating: 3.5/5 stars
Seven months into her sobriety, sociology professor Maris Heilman has her first blackout. She chalks it up to exhaustion, though she fears her husband and daughter suspect she’s drinking again. Whatever the cause, the glitches start becoming more frequent. Sometimes minutes, sometimes longer, but always leaving Maris with the same disorienting question: Where have I been? Then another blackout lands Maris in the ER, where she makes an alarming discovery: A network of women is battling the same inexplicable malady.
Erin Flanagan has crafted a unique psychological thriller meets science fiction story with BLACKOUT. I thought this story was going to be a straightforward thriller, perhaps one with an unreliable narrator, but what I found was something much more intricate. I’m not sure that I’m science savvy enough to know if parts of the plot to this story could really happen, but that didn’t stop them from being unsettling. Flanagan keeps the pacing to BLACKOUT at a steady rate with new discoveries leading to tension throughout the book. While Maris may be our main character, there are chapters here and there that give us an alternate point of view, which I thought helped to tie the entire story together.
TW: This story touches on a lot of triggering topics, so as always I recommend checking out StoryGraph for a complete list.
A huge thank you to TLC Book Tours for my gifted copy!
What Jess Reads 
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