#imogen crimp

[bookmoth13]

Give Me Everything You've Got by Imogen Crimp | 4,5⭐

Pub Date Jul 21 2026

Give Me Everything You've Got brings us Ruby, a filmmaker desperate for a breakthrough in the film industry, who has just arrived at the stunning country estate of her idol, the legendary feminist director Ellen. Outside, a ruthless summer heatwave. Inside, Ellen and her daughter, Lara, are warmly helping Ruby to settle in, and beginning to play a game whose rules Ruby isn't privy to.

Imogen Crimp prose made me feel completely lightheaded and out of breath. It just kept going and going under the oppressive insecure and anxious way with which Ruby navigated life, but especially life around Ellen and Lara.

What made me love it so much is how unapologetically suffocating it is and how well Mei Mei MacLeod's, the audiobook narrator, voice worked with making Ruby sound as winded as we felt. I'm usually not a fan of first person point of view, but it was one of the best things Crimp could've done with this story. Because Ruby is entirely consumed by her need for Ellen's validation, everything passes through the filter of her obsession, she can't see outside of her need to be seen by Ellen so se misses all the obvious red flags. We as the reader get no respite, we are trapped inside Ruby’s spiralling thoughts, experiencing everything like she is at the same time as she does.

There's an obvious power dynamic between them, they're mentor and mentee, and Crimp handles it with amazing precision. I'd even go as far as to say the obsession is mutual, it's just there is a power dynamic and you can't escape that. While Ruby wants to be consumed by Ellen, Ellen wants to consume Ruby and by doing so she exploits Ruby's desperation, mining her already waning confidence under the guise of getting her to the next level.

I couldn't look away even when when it felt too much, just as stuck in Ellen and Lara's enticing ways as Ruby was. Ellen's presence was almost overbearing, every time she was in the scene it felt like she consumed all the air in the room and that worked wonders to install this predatory energy about her.

The pacing is agonizing as the author stretches the tension so taut that it had me wondering if this wasn't a psychological horror. It wasn't, but it certainly felt like one at times. Again, at the risk of sounding repetitive, there is absolutely NO emotional relief, even the brief moments of apparent warmth between Ruby and Lara are tainted by the dread that everything is being staged, and honestly I'm not completely convinced it wasn't.

The unrelenting heatwave serves as the perfect sensory metaphor for the story itself. The air is thick, the constant building pressure between the characters is as exhausting as a night after an afternoon under the summer sun, it feels like you're trapped in the same fever dream that is slowly swallowing Ruby whole.

Give Me Everything You've Got is a beautifully dark exploration of corrupted mentorship and a mesmerizing masterclass in tension that demands you give it every ounce of attentions you can muster.

Thank you to Netgalley and Macmillan Audio for sending me this ALC in exchange for an honest review.

[serenityhues]

Need somebody else to read A Very Nice Girl by Imogen Crimp because I don't know how to cope with that ending.

I'd say she ripped my heart apart, but in a very specific kind of heartbreak.

[nostalgic--aries]

“He tells me he loves me when he's drunk, which is often, and I don't say anything, because I don't love him- or not in the way I used to understand love, anyway. He doesn't come near my inner life. Is that love, if he can't hurt me? If he can't reach in and grab hold of that essential part of me, squeeze it in his fist so that he's all there is? Can this be the stuff of centuries' worth of poetry, films and opera, tears,suicide--going to the supermarket together and watching TV in bed when we've got the day off and arguing about where I leave my shoes and why he recounts my anecdotes at parties as if he was there too when he wasn’t? “

A Very Nice Girl , Imogen Crimp

[tramp1948]

[tramp1948]

-A Very Nice Girl, Imogen Crimp

[bookcoversonly]

Title: A Very Nice Girl | Author: Imogen Crimp | Publisher: Henry Holt and Co. (2022)