The Ex

I read The Ex because everyone kept telling me the ending was impossible to guess. That is usually a warning sign. Books that promise a shocking twist often spend so much energy hiding the trick that they forget to make the people believable. Freida McFadden does not entirely avoid that problem, but she is very good at making the pages turn. I finished it in two sittings, annoyed at myself for not seeing the answer and annoyed at the book for cheating just enough to keep me from seeing it.

Cassie and Joel

Cassie owns a failing used bookstore called Bookland. She is not looking for a relationship, and she is not in a position to afford one. Joel is a doctor, handsome and attentive, and he asks her out anyway. On their first date, one of Joel's friends mistakes Cassie for Francesca, Joel's ex-girlfriend. It is an awkward moment, and it sets the tone for everything that follows.

Francesca is beautiful, brilliant, and a chef. Joel's friends loved her. She is the kind of ex who has become a legend in her absence, and Cassie cannot compete with a legend. The more she hears about Francesca, the more she feels like a replacement in a role that was already cast. Joel says Francesca is out of the picture. Cassie wants to believe him.

Then the harassment starts. Someone paints "SLUT" on Cassie's apartment door. Bookland is vandalized with red paint that looks like blood. The store is broken into and trashed. Cassie feels followed. She finds the word "slut" written inside her closet and realizes that whoever is doing this may have a key. The police are not much help. Joel is supportive, but he is also evasive whenever Francesca's name comes up.

Cassie's suspicion settles on Francesca. It is the obvious answer, and the novel wants you to accept it. A jealous ex, a new girlfriend, a campaign of vandalism: the pieces fit. The problem is that the pieces fit too well, and McFadden knows it.

The middle of the book is a careful accumulation of small violations. Cassie's apartment is entered, her belongings are moved, and her sense of safety erodes. She finds the word "slut" written inside her closet. She has a severe allergic reaction to peanuts and is saved by Joel, who happens to carry an EpiPen prescribed for her. The detail is touching until you start to wonder how Joel knew, and why he was so prepared. McFadden uses the romance to create suspicion without confirming it. Every kind gesture can be read as control.

The Halloween party is another set piece. Lydia suggests that Cassie dress as Cleopatra, and Joel and his friends react with shock because Francesca wore the same costume. Cassie is humiliated. She assumes Lydia did it on purpose. The scene is a good example of how the novel builds paranoia from social details rather than evidence. Nobody has threatened Cassie directly. The threat is in the looks, the pauses, and the stories about a woman who is not there.

The other narrator

The novel alternates between Cassie's first-person chapters, labeled "The New Girl," and another first-person narrator labeled "The Ex." The Ex is obsessed with Joel. She tracks him with a location-sharing app he set up while they were dating. She follows him to restaurants, watches him kiss another woman, and starts stalking the woman she calls "Olive" because of her olive skin. She copies Olive's keys, enters her apartment, and investigates her life.

The reader is encouraged to assume that the Ex is Francesca and that Olive is Cassie. That assumption is the engine of the book. It explains why the Ex's chapters feel so menacing and why Cassie's chapters feel so paranoid. It also allows McFadden to hide the truth in plain sight. The Ex is not Francesca. The Ex is Anna, a woman Joel dated for ten years before he left her. Olive is Francesca. The two storylines are not happening at the same time. Anna's chapters are set before Cassie ever met Joel.

This is a clever structure, and it works better than it has any right to. The reveal reorders everything you have read. Anna is not a minor friend of Joel's. She is the woman who refused to accept the breakup. Francesca is not a ghost haunting the edges of the story. She is a living woman in Anna's timeline, and then a dead woman in Cassie's. The novel's title becomes a pun: the Ex is Anna, but the woman Cassie thinks is the Ex is Francesca, and the woman Anna is stalking is Francesca too.

The surveillance is the most unsettling part of Anna's chapters. Joel set up a location-sharing app while they were dating, and Anna never turned it off. She knows where he is, who he is with, and how long he stays. The technology is ordinary, which makes it worse. This is not a spy thriller with hidden cameras. It is a woman using a feature that millions of couples use to share their lives, and she is using it to refuse the end of a relationship. The novel understands that intimacy tools can become weapons without anyone changing the software.

The men in the novel are mostly disappointing. Joel is kind, but he is also passive. He lets the women in his life manage his feelings, his relationships, and his history. He does not tell Cassie the truth about Francesca until he has to. He does not notice what Anna is doing until it is almost too late. Con, Anna's husband, is barely a character. The book is more interested in the women's jealousy than in the men they are jealous over, which is a smart choice, but it also makes the romantic stakes feel thin. Cassie wants Joel because he is available and attentive. The novel never gives us a convincing reason why he is worth all this.

The harassment

The present-day harassment of Cassie is a separate mystery. If Francesca is dead, she cannot be the one painting slurs on Cassie's door. The novel needs another suspect, and it finds one in Lydia, Joel's friend. Lydia is married to Pete, and she is unhappy. She resents Cassie for taking Francesca's place. She blames Joel for Francesca's death. She is also the person who introduced Joel and Francesca and encouraged him to leave Anna.

Lydia's plan is not subtle. She shows up at Cassie's apartment with a bottle of wine and does not drink any of it. The wine is poisoned. Cassie collapses. Anna and Joel arrive, and Anna calls an ambulance. Cassie survives. When she wakes up in the hospital, Joel tells her that Lydia tried to kill her and that Anna was the one who found her.

The rescue gives Anna a moment of redemption, or something like it. She is the woman who has been stalking Francesca, but she is also the woman who saves Cassie's life. McFadden is careful to keep Anna sympathetic enough that the final revelation can still surprise you. It is not a fair trick, exactly, but it is an effective one.

The epilogue

The final twist comes after the main plot has been resolved. Cassie visits Anna and her husband, Con, who is also known as Dean. While she is there, she finds Francesca's gold rose necklace in Anna's dresser. Joel tells her that Francesca was wearing the necklace the night she died. Cassie realizes that Anna killed Francesca and made the death look like a suicide.

Anna's motive is jealousy. She resented Lydia for pushing Joel toward Francesca. She resented Francesca for taking her place in Joel's life. She hoped Joel would be arrested for the murder. When that did not happen, she built a new life with Con and tried to move on. The ending suggests that she has not moved on at all. She is willing to leave Cassie and Joel alone, but only as long as they do not cross her.

Cassie decides not to tell anyone. She has her happy ending, and she is not willing to give it up. The novel frames this as a moral compromise, and it is. Cassie is not a detective. She is a woman who wants to marry Joel, and she chooses the version of the story that lets her do that. The last line is chilling because it is so ordinary. People protect the lives they have built, even when the foundation is rotten.

What the book is doing

The Ex is a novel about jealousy, but it is also a novel about idealization. Cassie is jealous of a woman she has never met. Anna is jealous of a woman who replaced her. Francesca, the object of all this jealousy, is barely present as a person. She is a reputation, a photograph, a gold necklace. The men in the novel are not worth the obsession. Joel is handsome and kind, but he is also passive, evasive, and willing to let the women around him manage his emotional life.

The book is interested in the stories women tell themselves about other women. Cassie imagines Francesca as a rival. Anna imagines Francesca as a thief. Lydia imagines Francesca as a daughter she lost. None of them see Francesca clearly. The novel's twist works because it turns the reader's own assumptions into part of the plot. We are all Cassie, imagining the ex.

McFadden's prose is plain and fast. She is not a stylist, and she does not try to be. The chapters are short, the dialogue is functional, and the twists arrive on schedule. That is not a criticism if you are in the mood for this kind of book. It is a criticism if you want the characters to feel like more than pieces on a board.

The problems

The biggest problem is the plot holes. Cassie is convinced that someone has a key to her apartment, and the novel never fully explains how Lydia got one. Cassie's EpiPen disappears, leaving her vulnerable to a peanut allergy attack, and the theft is never resolved. These are not small details. They are the mechanics of the mystery, and the book waves them away because it is more interested in the reveal.

The second problem is Cassie. She is passive for most of the novel. Things happen to her, and she reacts. She does not investigate, except in the most tentative way. The Ex is the active character, and the Ex is the villain. That is an interesting inversion, but it leaves the protagonist with little to do except be frightened and fall in love.

The third problem is the ending's dependence on a twist. Once you know the answer, the book loses some of its power. The reread is not as satisfying as the first read, because the clues are not as carefully planted as they could be. The novel is built for surprise, not for depth.

There is also the matter of the alternate ending. McFadden originally self-published the book in 2019, and later wrote a different finale for the 2020 reissue after readers complained about the ending. This edition uses the 2019 version, so the ending described here is the original one. If you pick up a newer copy, you may get a different resolution. That is unusual for a thriller, and it makes the book's publication history part of its story.

Should you read it

I would recommend The Ex to readers who want a fast, twisty thriller for a plane ride or a rainy afternoon. It is not a book that rewards close reading or deep character study. It is a book that wants you to turn the page and say "wait, what?" at the end. On that level, it works.

I would not recommend it to readers who are tired of unreliable narrators and last-minute reveals. The Ex is built from the same parts as a lot of other domestic thrillers. The bookstore setting is a nice touch, and the Anna chapters are genuinely creepy, but the book is not doing anything new with the form. It is doing a familiar thing very efficiently.

The final image, the gold necklace in the drawer, is the best thing in the novel. It is a small object that carries a whole history of jealousy and violence, and Cassie's decision to leave it there says more about her than the rest of the book does. I just wish the novel had earned that moment with more care.