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Book: “You Did Nothing Wrong” by C.G. Drews
Publishing Info: St Martin’s Press, March 2026
Where Did I Get This Book: I received an eARC from NetGalley
Where You Can Get This Book: WorldCat.org | Amazon | Indiebound
Book Description: A relentless, horror-inducing psychological suspense for fans of The Push and Baby Teeth by New York Times bestselling author CG Drews.
Single mother Elodie’s life has become a fairy tale. She’s met Bren, equal parts golden-retriever devoted and sinfully handsome. He’s whisked her and her autistic son, Jude, to the crumbling family house he’s renovating. She has a new husband, a new house, and a new baby on the way. Everything is perfect.
Then Jude claims he can hear voices in the walls. He says their renovations are “hurting” the house. Even Elodie can’t ignore it–something strange is going on. The question is, is it with the house, or with her son?
Then the one secret Elodie has been hiding is revealed, and no one is safe anymore.
A pulse-pounding, clever take on the haunted house novel, You Did Nothing Wrong examines the complexities of motherhood and the twisted bonds of family as it races to its shocking ending.
Review: Thank you to NetGalley for providing me with an eARC of this novel!
We are getting some interesting subversions of the haunted house horror sub-genre recently! I love a haunted house story, but I’ve been pretty pleased with the way that authors have been experimenting with the themes that come with the sub-genre. “You Did Nothing Wrong” definitely falls into that category, because something that starts off seeming like just a ghostly tale turns into something even scarier than things that go bump in the night.
Whew, this book is intense for so many different reasons. We follow Elodie, a young mother to an autistic six year old named Jude (more on him in a bit) who has just married Bren, and is pregnant again. They move into a new house that Bren is trying to fix up, but Jude keeps talking about how the house is alive. And Elodie starts seeing strange things too. This is one layer of the tension, because Drews also throws in hints and clues to Elodie’s past, which carry a whole lot of darkness even if they aren’t apparent from the jump. Elodie is a narrator that I would shift between wanting to root for, to being completely horrified by, and I never quite knew if she was someone I could trust as a protagonist. But I had the same thing happen with Bren, who on the surface seems so kind and patient and doting, but has little flashes of menace and aggression. But then again, is that actually the case, or is it because we see what Elodie sees? As the story goes on and the tension between Elodie and Bren escalates, mostly because she also thinks she’s seeing things in the house AND because Bren is potentially abusing or manipulating Jude. As the story goes on Elodie gets more unhinged, but is she paranoid? Or is it something else altogether? Drews kept me guessing a good long time, and I was tearing through this book desperate to find out what happened next.
Another stressful point is the themes with Jude, who is presumed to be autistic based on how he is written, but who hasn’t been diagnosed because Elodie refuses to do so in case it is somehow blamed on her. As someone who has a child who is presumed autistic, there were beats in here that felt very familiar, either due to the way that some people just refuse to understand some of the more uncomfortable things about autistic people, or the way that things can go south in the blink of an eye without necessarily knowing why because your kid doesn’t really know why either. You add in a possessive obsession she has to her child and it makes it all the more intense. But then again, I was ALSO freaking out at Bren because I was so afraid that he was going to hurt Jude due to HIS misconceptions about how to treat an autistic child. It made me so uncomfortable but I’m pretty sure that was the point. Gosh I just wanted to sweep Jude up.
I do think that the ending had a few too many shocks and surprises, however. I’ve never been one to get behind a thriller novel that has a lot of last minute twists just to get a rise out of the reader, and while this book still stands very well on its own two feet due to the things I mentioned, I do think that there was a bit of an overreach when it comes to how things all shook out by the end.
But that’s a quibble in the long run, because overall I greatly enjoyed “You Did Nothing Wrong”. It kept me stressed out and it kept me flipping the pages whenever I had a chance. I definitely recommend it.
Rating 8: An addictive horror tale with unreliable narration and incredibly tense moments flies high for awhile, but has a slight petering out of an ending.
Reader’s Advisory:
“You Did Nothing Wrong” is included on the Goodreads lists “Autism in Horror Literature”, and “Dark Literature”.
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