Emiko Jean wrote eight books for young readers, then crossed into adult crime with a novel about a girl who came back. Before You Were Anne by Emiko Jean is the second in that series, and the interesting thing about it is how little it behaves like a second book. The procedural scaffolding is still there, and a great deal of it is very good. But roughly a third of these pages belong to the victim, written in second person, running from a farm in northern Japan to a hostess club in Tokyo to a locked attic room in Idaho, and those chapters are where the novel actually lives.
Where Before You Were Anne Sits in Emiko Jean’s Work
Book one gave Detective Chelsey Calhoun a case that rhymed with her own sister’s disappearance. This one goes further back.
Chelsey is thirty-six, five months pregnant with a daughter, and adopted into a white family in a white town where she was the only Japanese kid for miles. She was told she was left at a fire station in a warming box. She stopped asking for more at eight, because asking upset her mother and provoked her father.
Then she catches a case about a woman who lived under an assumed name and a daughter who went hunting for a past nobody would explain to her. Jean has built the whole novel so that the investigation and the detective’s own buried origin corrode each other. It is the oldest structural trick in crime fiction, and it works here because both halves are given real weight rather than one being decoration for the other.
Three Voices, One of Them in Second Person
The chapters rotate between Chelsey in close third, Naomi in a drugged and unmoored present, and Rika in second person.
That last choice is the book. Before You Were Anne by Emiko Jean addresses its dead woman directly, from the moment of her birth in a field at the end of a hot summer to her last breath at the bottom of a staircase, and the effect is unnerving in exactly the right way. It reads like someone reciting a life back to its owner. You did this. Then you did this. Then this was done to you.
It also solves a problem the genre usually fumbles. Murder victims are normally reconstructed by other people, out of evidence and interviews. Here Rika gets to keep her own interiority for four hundred pages while the detectives are still working out her actual name.
Rika’s Chapters Are the Book
Her arc runs from a farming village to a Tokyo hostess club to a fiancé visa and a house in rural Idaho, and Jean does not rush a single stage of it.
The Tokyo material is genuinely charming before it curdles. Rika is good at the job, funny about it, clear-eyed about the transaction. The Idaho material is the opposite of charming and is written with a terrible patience: the passport that goes missing, the receipts taped into a notebook, the slide lock fitted to the outside of an attic door while she stands there holding the drill.
Two details in Before You Were Anne by Emiko Jean are worth the price of admission on their own. One is the sequence of letters she writes to her mother and never sends. The other is her private image of a door in her mind that she steps through when it gets bad, closing it behind her. Both are more devastating than any of the violence.
The Case, and Where It Sags
The investigation is competent, well paced and occasionally too obliging.
- Coincidence carries a lot. A photograph on a wall, a card in a pocket, a neighbour with dementia who happens to photograph birds from exactly the right porch.
- The middle stretch is a lot of doors. Canvassing, hotels, records requests. Realistic, and not always compelling.
- One antagonist is thinly drawn. A late-arriving villain gets a motive and a lawyer and not much of a person.
- The mural sequence strains. A teenager painting her own investigation on a bedroom wall in invisible ink is a wonderful image and slightly too convenient as a clue.
None of it wrecks the book. But readers coming to Before You Were Anne by Emiko Jean for the puzzle will find the puzzle is the least ambitious thing in it.
What Before You Were Anne Does With Chelsey’s Own Origin
There is a scene about two-thirds through where Chelsey’s partner tells her something small and factual about the story she was raised on, and the floor goes out from under her.
Jean handles the aftermath better than she handles the reveal. What follows is not a twist so much as a slow reordering: a phone call with her mother that is neither a reconciliation nor a rupture, an old cop in a cabin who has been waiting years for someone to ask, a swab dropped through an after-hours slot at the lab. The novel is very good on the specific hunger of not knowing your own medical history while you are growing a person, and on how a family’s kindest lie can still be a theft.
Do You Need to Read The Return of Ellie Black First?
Not strictly. The case is standalone and the essentials are recapped.
You will get more out of Chelsey’s relationship with her sister and with her dead father if you have, though, and one late conversation lands considerably harder with that history behind it. Start with book one if you have the time.
Content Notes for Before You Were Anne
Before You Were Anne by Emiko Jean is bleak and specific. Domestic violence over years, including strangulation, beating and near-drowning, on the page. Coercive control and financial abuse. Human trafficking, described in detail. Sexual coercion. Grooming of a teenage girl by an adult. Murder, including stabbing, described. A police shooting. Hostage situation. Graphic childbirth and postpartum haemorrhage. Substance dependence, including a mother drugging herself while caring for an infant, and withdrawal. Self-harm. Pregnancy loss discussed. Overdose deaths, including of parents. Child neglect. Racism and fetishisation. Dementia. Human remains, described.
Read it if / Skip it if
Read it if you want a crime novel that spends most of its energy on the victim; if second person done well is a pleasure rather than a gimmick; if you like a detective who is competent and also coming apart.
Skip it if you need a tight solvable mystery; if the content notes above rule it out; if you want your protagonists to end the book in one piece. Before You Were Anne by Emiko Jean does not do consolation.
Read these next
Five for readers who finish Before You Were Anne by Emiko Jean and want more of the same weather:
- The Return of Ellie Black by Emiko Jean. Where Chelsey starts, and still the better introduction.
- Daughter of Mine by Megan Miranda. For a woman going back through her own family’s version of events.
- It’s Not Her by Mary Kubica. For the missing-woman machinery at a faster clip.
- Hooked by Asako Yuzuki. For appetite, womanhood and Japan on its own terms.
- Everyone Is Watching by Heather Gudenkauf. For readers who wanted the thriller dialled higher.
What Stays With You
Rika’s Japanese family keeps a koseki, the household register that records a bloodline back through generations and can only be requested by a descendant who can prove who they are. Her daughter pays for a copy in secret and prints it in a school library, and that single sheet of paper starts everything that follows.
That is the object Before You Were Anne by Emiko Jean leaves in your hands. Not the knife and not the warehouse: a list of names, and the question of who is allowed one. Every woman in this novel has hers taken, altered, translated, or burned, and the book’s real argument is that the theft of a name is not a metaphor. It sags in its middle and it leans on chance more than it should. It also contains the best sustained writing Jean has done, and I suspect I will be thinking about those unsent letters for a long time.
