My book club’s April pick was This Story Might Save Your Life by Tiffany Crum. I went in blind, which ended up making the reading experience feel even more layered.

The story follows Benny Abbott and Joy Moore, best friends and co-hosts of a popular podcast built around stories of people who made it through the unthinkable. Their dynamic is magnetic, and everything about their lives feels carefully constructed, at least on the surface. The illusion quickly unravels when Benny arrives one morning to record and finds Joy and her husband, Xander, missing.

What follows is a slow-building unraveling of truth. It is told through layers that shift between the present-day investigation, the rise of Benny and Joy’s podcast, and pieces of Joy’s own writing. As Benny tries to make sense of what happened, he also finds himself under suspicion, forcing him to confront not just the mystery of their disappearance, but the reality of his relationships with both Joy and Xander.

As the story moves forward, it becomes less about solving a single moment and more about understanding everything that led up to it. Secrets, emotional avoidance, and complicated love sit at the center. It makes you question what is real, and how well anyone can truly know the people closest to them.

A Mix of Genres That Keeps You Guessing

I do love a good best friends to lovers trope and will always root for a HEA, so I went into parts of this hoping for that kind of payoff. But I struggled a bit because I could not fully figure out what this book wanted to be.

It moves between romance and something much darker, and while that can work, here it left me feeling unsure of where I was supposed to land as a reader.

The Theme That Stuck With Me

One of the biggest themes that stood out to me was emotional avoidance. So much of what happens could have been avoided if the characters had been honest with themselves from the beginning, and that tension stayed with me the entire story.

It really makes you think about how easily things can spiral when feelings are not addressed head-on.

Let’s Talk About Xander

There were moments where I could understand Xander’s feelings toward Joy and Benny, because there was clearly love there. But that understanding kept getting overshadowed by his behavior.

I found myself sitting in that gray area for a while, questioning what I was witnessing. By the end, that gray area disappears. Xander’s actions cross a clear line, and for me, there was no justification for what he did to Joy.

The Ending

The ending felt a bit like a deus ex machina. It wrapped things up in a way that felt slightly too convenient, which left me unsatisfied and questioning if I missed something.

I actually went back and reread the final chapters because of that. Everything connects, but it did not fully land emotionally for me.

Audiobook vs Reading

I listened to this as an audiobook and would absolutely recommend that format over reading. It added another layer to the emotional tension and made the experience feel more immersive.

For The Bookish Girl

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