Review: Try To Keep Up by Shay Knudsen

Synopsis:

Twenty-two-year-old Kody Thomas takes a nanny job hoping for the clean slate she desperately needs. Instead, she walks into a house where nothing-and no one-is what they seem.

Fifteen-year-old Piper wakes up as different versions of herself. Some days she’s shy and soft-spoken. Other days she’s bold, impulsive… or chillingly strategic. Her handwriting changes.

Her memories don’t align. Her moods snap like a switch flipping in the dark. And the girl Kody is meant to protect may be hiding truths even from herself. When the boy next door goes missing, a diary of disturbing drawings suggests Piper knows more than she’s saying.

Trapped in a tightening maze of fractured memories, shifting identities, and buried secrets, Kody must uncover the truth before it’s too late. Because the danger might be living behind Piper’s eyes, or lurking much closer.

Shop The Book: Try To Keep Up
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A major part of this book centers on something I absolutely love reading about in psychological thrillers, but I cannot say what it is without giving it away. I love when a thriller actually dives deep into real psychology in a way that feels thrilling and thoughtful at the same time, and this one did.

If you had to protect someone whose sense of reality shifted from one day to the next, how would you know what was actually true?

The Story

Twenty-two-year-old Kody Thomas takes a nanny job hoping for the clean slate she desperately needs. Instead she walks into a house where nothing and no one is what they seem. Fifteen-year-old Piper wakes up as different versions of herself. Some days she is shy and soft-spoken. Other days she is bold, impulsive, or chillingly strategic. Her handwriting changes. Her memories do not align. Her moods snap like a switch flipping in the dark. When the boy next door goes missing, a diary of disturbing drawings suggests Piper knows more than she is saying. Trapped in a tightening maze of fractured memories, shifting identities, and buried secrets, Kody must uncover the truth before it is too late, because the danger might be living behind Piper’s eyes, or somewhere much closer.

Reading Experience

Reading this book was like trying to wade through murky water. Reality was never reliable for either Kody or Piper as they told their story. Piper was dissociated, unpredictable, and at times fragile, while Kody was constantly struggling to add it all up and figure out what was truly happening around her and to the family she was living with.

Writing Style

Shay Knudsen handles the delicate psychological layers of this story so well. The struggles felt incredibly relatable and the trauma responses were intense but realistic and believable. I love reading books where the reality you are following as a reader might end up being a ruse, or might not be, and this one lives entirely inside that uncertainty.

Characters

Kody has such a sweet and empathetic heart. She genuinely cares for the family she nannies for and the child she is responsible for. You can feel how much she loves them and values both her relationship with them and their health and safety, and she is even willing to speak up and put her own neck on the line to advocate for them throughout the story.

Piper just breaks my heart. She is so young and has already been through so much trauma that it has severely affected her development and emotional maturity. Once you begin to understand what is really going on inside her head, it is impossible not to become emotionally attached and want to reach through the pages to make everything better for her.

Her little brother is a sweet side character who brings affection, playfulness, and life into an otherwise dark family situation. And their mother is a perfectionist to the extreme, placing enormous weight on what others think of her, her career, and how well she runs her household.

Heartbeat

The heartbeat of this story is about navigating deep trauma responses that the brain develops almost involuntarily in order to survive. The brain can be such a sensitive organ, but it is also remarkably quick to adapt, and when it learns an environment is unsafe or could be again, it can do amazingly, terrifyingly strange things to protect itself.

Final Thoughts

I highly recommend Try To Keep Up to psychological thriller fans who love unreliable characters, hard topics, and chilling twists. This is Shay Knudsen’s debut novel and I will absolutely be devouring whatever she has planned next.

Release date: September 1, 2026

ARC provided by the author and Harbor and Stone Press. All thoughts are my own.

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Shay Knudsen writes psychological thrillers that dig into secrets and the things people try to hide. When she’s not plotting dark twists and sinister motives, you can usually find her buried in a book, wandering through bookstores, or quietly imagining what terrible thing could happen next.