“My experience of all this so far was the opposite of the woman who felt like face blindness let her live in a world that had no strangers. For me, right now, everyone felt like a stranger. Even me.”
Genre: Romance
Actual Rating: 5 stars
Spicy Meter: 2 fire emoji
Content Warnings: Discusses parental death and congenital disease. Revolves around face blindness caused by an open brain surgery. Touches on bullying, gaslighting, and suicide attempts. Contains sexual content.
“Hello Stranger” follows Sadie Montgomery, an almost-up-and-coming portrait artist (or so she hopes), as she faces the world with acquired prosopagnosia—aka face blindness. Yes, you heard that right: a portrait artist that can’t see faces after undergoing a sort of elective brain surgery 6 weeks before the most important portrait competition she could’ve ever dreamed of being a part of.
Katherine Center is one of my favorite authors but oh, did I not see this one coming. Katherine has once again brought us a whole new world with such an outlandish (but also possible?) situation. Like, this book was literally Murphy’s Law brought to life (anything that can go wrong will go wrong), and I was there for it.
With quirky and lovable characters, “Hello Stranger” was a very interesting take on how to take one day at a time, even when life feels like it’s falling apart. It’s a true ode to the harsh truth: we’re more than our looks and our mistakes. Also—this book is only set down as a Romance novel, but I swear it is more of a Rom Com if I’ve ever read one, Sadie and the situations she got herself in made me literally laugh out loud. I also kind of saw where the plot twist was coming, but that didn’t make me enjoy it any less.
I would highly recommended “Hello Stranger”, especially if you’re looking for an engaging, unique read, with a super relatable main character and packed with a well carried out (low-key funny) love triangle.
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ARC provided by NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press in exchange for an honest review.
Publication Date: July 11, 2023
“I’d painted many models over the years, and it was never nerve-racking like this. But this was different. Usually the models were across the room, not right up next to me. (…) And they were not people I had kissed. Or yelled at. (…) Or cried in front of.
They were always strangers.
That’s when I realized that (he) wasn’t a stranger.
I didn’t know exactly what he was to me, but he wasn’t a stranger.”
andrea's galley 