My Review for This Might Hurt by Stephanie Wrobel
This Might Hurt was August’s read for #thatbonkersbookclub, and I really liked it! 📚 The cult scenario didn’t really register with me until someone else mentioned it, so yes, perhaps I do overlook the things I don’t want to see! 🙈😂 In my head, Wisewood was just a weird retreat that people often didn’t leave… yeah, Sam — a cult! 🤦♀️🤣
I did get confused with the main characters from time to time. Those I thought had ended up at Wisewood turned out not to actually be them after all! 🤔 The book was also written across different timelines, let’s call them before and after Kit goes to Wisewood. It took me a while to work out what was going on, who was who, and how they were all relevant to each other.
That aside, I enjoyed the story and the characters, and I’ll definitely be reading more books by Stephanie Wrobel. 😊📖
A very belated thank you to Michael Joseph for the free copy of This Might Hurt by Stephanie Wrobel. All thoughts are entirely my own. 📚💕
About the BookWelcome to Wisewood. We'll keep your secrets if you keep ours.
Natalie Collins hasn't heard from her sister in more than half a year.
The last time they spoke, Kit was slogging from mundane workdays to obligatory happy hours to crying in the shower about their dead mother. She told Natalie she was sure there was something more out there.
And then she found Wisewood.
On a private island off the coast of Maine, Wisewood's guests commit to six-month stays. During this time, they're prohibited from contact with the rest of the world--no Internet, no phones, no exceptions. But the rules are for a good reason: to keep guests focused on achieving true fearlessness so they can become their Maximized Selves. Natalie thinks it's a bad idea, but Kit has had enough of her sister's cynicism and voluntarily disappears off the grid.
Six months later Natalie receives a menacing e-mail from a Wisewood account threatening to reveal the secret she's been keeping from Kit. Panicked, Natalie hurries north to come clean to her sister and bring her home. But she's about to learn that Wisewood won't let either of them go without a fight.
As a kid in the suburbs of Chicago, I remember bringing a backpack to the library every two weeks during the summer and filling it to the brim. My favorites were Baby-Sitters Club, Nancy Drew, and the Thoroughbred series. I wrote a lot of stories too. My mom helped me type and add computer graphics to one called How Mary Ann Got Lost at the Zoo. (Spoiler alert: it has a happy ending. Dark turns didn’t make their way into my writing until adulthood!) When I was eight or nine, I went through a serious horse phase—I was in the ninetieth percentile for height but convinced I would someday be a jockey—and wrote a 100-page book about them that thankfully never saw the light of day. But the older I got, the less creative writing I did. I’ve always wanted to write fiction, but doing it as a kid for fun was one thing; considering it as a profession was another. Being an author just didn’t seem like a realistic or practical career choice.
After college I worked as a copywriter for advertising agencies in Chicago. During this time, I wrote and helped produce television and radio spots, print ads, billboards, and digital campaigns for brands like Coors, McDonald’s, and Capital One.
In 2014 I moved to London, so my partner could attend business school. A year later, while I was between freelance copywriting jobs and in a rut, I applied to graduate schools for creative writing. It was the best decision I’ve ever made.
I moved to Boston to attend Emerson College in 2016. Before grad school, I would come up with a book idea, write a chapter or two, then give up. The MFA program made me take writing seriously for the first time. I had my first short story published in the Bellevue Literary Review and accrued 221 rejections for all the other stories I wrote and submitted. (It pains me to report that number is not an exaggeration.) By the end of the program, I’d finished my first novel, about a mother and daughter named Patty and Rose Gold Watts.
Darling Rose Gold was published in March 2020, hitting the Sunday Times, USA Today, and Globe and Mail bestseller lists. The book has sold in twenty-one countries and was a finalist for the Edgar Award for Best First Novel, the Barry Award for Best First Novel, and the Macavity Award for Best First Novel. My second book, This Might Hurt, about a woman trying to rescue her sister from the clutches of a cult that promises fearlessness to its followers, published in 2022. My third novel, USA Today bestseller The Hitchcock Hotel, published in September 2024. It’s about a Hitchcock fanatic with an agenda who invites five of his former friends for a weekend stay at his themed hotel in the New England mountains. My fourth novel, Revenge Plot, follows an aspiring author willing to do whatever it takes to land the dream agent who already rejected him. It publishes November 2026.
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