Review of You’re Safe Here by Leslie Stephens

Have you wondered what would happen if we lived in a world where Elizabeth Holmes was actually competent? Or if she somehow managed to fail upwards, like Elon Musk, despite being a woman? You’re Safe Here posits a wealthy female supervillain, a disgruntled coder, and a pregnant girlfriend chasing solitude in lieu of enlightenment. Leslie Stephens looks to draw together the disparate threads of quantified wellness, middle-class yuppie obsession with individualism, and the classic trope of not wanting to talk to one’s partner about important stuff.

Maggie is preggers and decides it’s the best to embark on a six-week jaunt in a WellPod adrift in the Pacific Ocean. Her partner, Noa, is a programmer at the company launching the pods—but she spots a problem and tries to sound an alarm. As their respective storylines unfold, Stephens also dives into their respective backstories, their relationship, and some of the life of Emmett, the enigmatic founder behind it all….

This is a weird book. It straddles the line between thriller and thought experiment, but like so many literary attempts at what is ultimately a form of science fiction, it often falls flat and ends up sounding like so much empty noise. There’s a kind of absurdist fatalism to the story that left me off balance the entire time. On one hand, so many of the twists (such as the identity of Gamma) felt imminently predictable. On the other hand, the plot careens forward without truly stopping to shore up the main characters, their feelings, and indeed their motivations.

When I went into this book, I thought it was more on the horror end of thriller—and that’s on me for that misapprehension, yet I can’t help but feel let down. None of the characters work for me. Maggie and Noa have a terrible relationship, and it’s weird that they don’t know how to act like adults and talk to each other. No one ever comments on the cheating in this book like it’s, you know, wrong. It’s just happening.

Emmett is also a really disappointing villain. Stephens set her up as quite arch, yet in the end her plans are cozily small-E evil in that they really only involve Maggie. The soapy twist that Maggie is Emmett’s daughter separated-at-birth is, as I said, somewhat predictable and also … unfulfilling.

It just feels like Stephens is trying to have her cake and eat it too. If You’re Safe Here is meant to be a serious deconstruction of how individualized wellness tech is dehumanizing us and cutting us off from each other, then the WellPods need to be more overtly sinister than they actually are. All we really get are a few hints—like with Maggie’s disaffected mother. If, on the other hand, this is supposed to be a more intimate portrait of the lengths one might go to reunite their family, I would have wanted a more sympathetic slant on Emmett.

The ending, instead, is a hot mess of mixed up tropes. Noa and Maggie don’t get closure. Emmett gets no comeuppance, and no one ever challenges the WellPods-as-apps-on-steroids metaphor. That is to say—what is the point here?

You’re Safe Here is a perfect example of what happens when you hand someone a lot of tropes as ingredients and say, “Write a compelling novel.” Like cooking, writing is more than just following a recipe. There’s technique. I’m not sure what technique Stephens used here, but it doesn’t work.