When No One is Watching

When No One is Watching

By Alyssa Cole

Sydney Green is Brooklyn born and raised, but her beloved neighborhood seems to change every time she blinks. Condos are sprouting like weeds, FOR SALE signs are popping up overnight, and the neighbors she’s known all her life are disappearing. To hold onto her community’s past and present, Sydney channels her frustration into a walking tour and finds an unlikely and unwanted assistant in one of the new arrivals to the block—her neighbor Theo.

But Sydney and Theo’s deep dive into history quickly becomes a dizzying descent into paranoia and fear. Their neighbors may not have moved to the suburbs after all, and the push to revitalize the community may be more deadly than advertised.

When does coincidence become conspiracy? Where do people go when gentrification pushes them out? Can Sydney and Theo trust each other—or themselves—long enough to find out before they too disappear?

I struggled with this one - I'm not sure where exactly it's lacking, but it did feel lacking to me.  I didn't warm up the characters right away, or even at all.  They switch off viewpoints between Theo and Sydney and we're introduced to both as they're drunk/hungover and aimless.  Sydney is admittedly paranoid and kind of belligerent, Theo is a weird passive aggressive doormat.  Both have "secrets," which are kind of out of left field, albeit nothing too outre for the genre.  They're not really people I like spending time with, or feel empathetic towards.  So that's strike one.

Strike two is maybe the concept itself.  It's basically a "what if gentrification was actually a legit conspiracy to eliminate black people from a community (instead of simply being a convenient byproduct) and people were being murdered and experimented on" kind of concept.  Not a bad idea, per se, but... I don't know, there were thriller-ish elements - the weird cabbie, the drugged man, the fake meter reader - but we also spent a lot of time just rehashing basic history, i.e., the seizure of land from anyone non-white, if the land was valuable at that time, the racial policing, yada yada yada.  Like yeah, it's important for background, but it also slows down the pace a loooooot.

It's compared to Get Out in the description, but I feel like it's a less successful take on the genre. Maybe the idea just lends itself better to a theatrical presentation. Maybe it's because there's never really a point at which any white person (other than Theo and possibly Jenn/Jen) is even marginally suspected to be a good person? Like, forget microaggressions, it's pretty much just straight up aggression.  I think it loses some of the thriller feel here too, because we're not second guessing whether this is actually happening - it's actually happening, and it's not that subtle. Maybe if we spent all the narration with Sydney? Then Theo could have been a wild card, and added more uncertainty to the story. 

I liked the incorporation of the old folks into the "actually onto the villains' game the whole time" role, but feel like they were underused - again, with main characters like Sydney and Theo, I think bringing the old people in (and potentially putting them at risk, raising the stakes) would make you care more about the characters.  

I also appreciated how all of the MANY people Sydney and Theo killed (at least, like 5-10, right? I lost track at the rejuvenation meeting) were just elided over since the corporation took care of everything.  Really? How convenient. And convenient that both Sydney and Theo were like, cold blooded shooters. We spend all this time really laying the groundwork for how realistic a conspiracy this could be, and then blow it all up with the dumb-enough-to-use-a-neighborhood-chatroom-to-lay-bare-their-plots, plus don't get me started on all the Wild West shooting goin' on in them thar hospital.

What's weird to me is how many people downvoted it solely because of the language.  I mean, there were a lot of other issues besides the cursing, for sure.  It felt kind of messy.  I'm not big into Cole's other romance novels, so it might just be her style, but it fell flat to me.  Again, because the reader knows the corporation is behind all of it, but it takes so long for Sydney and Theo to catch up that we don't have a lot of time for unfolding the conspiracy.  It's pretty much: hey, everyone we interacted with in the book is a bad guy and they're having a meeting this Tuesday. Literally, even the lawyer for her mother is not merely lazy and uncaring (which would have still been fine for drama too! We need those uncaring bystanders and again - uncertainty builds tension!) but actively involved.  Sometimes it can be frustrating to get done with "the bad guy" only to find out they're only a small part of the bigger picture, and here's an even bigger and badder guy we never suspected, but this was frustrating too.  We never even catch a glimpse of the snake's head.

33: A Social-Horror Book