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3.32 AVERAGE
3.32 AVERAGE
dark
mysterious
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
No, she is not dead, she is lost, lost. Missing. Gone. There's lots of things behind those words, and I can't look at them now. But I feel them.
i'm so fascinated by the way [a: megan abbott|29593|Megan Abbott|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1341365230p2/29593.jpg] sees girlhood. she writes about being a teenage girl in a way that fills me with dread and nostalgia at the same time - the feeling of being adrift in the world, of sensing you're on the cusp of something big and yet feeling terrified of what comes ahead. and more than anything, the way she describes friendships between girls, completely nailing the whole complexity and the desperate love you feel for the other.
it's funny because we actually see lizzie and evie interacting very little in the book,
Spoiler
seeing as evie is missing for the most of it,her writing style is definitely not for everyone - her prose is rich and she adores repetition - but i think it helps to create such an atmospheric read, i really love it.
dark
emotional
mysterious
sad
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
I could have read about Tay Sach's disease or something today and impressed people tomorrow at college but no, I had to stumble into this and read it in 6 hours!! Something this good demands to be read! Something so insane and weird and mysterious and everything. :D
This book got three stars from me - not because of the writing (which is gorgeous) or the plot (which is suspenseful), but because of how completely unprepared I was for the nauseating subject matter. This is not your average "girl goes missing, hunt her sicko kidnapper down" kind of reads. This is a story of a missing girl with undercurrents of sexual longing and incestuous relationships and sex as gratitude, all told through the naive but blossoming eyes of a thirteen-year-old girl who literally has NO IDEA what is going on under her very nose... and you want to scream at her through the pages, warn her, help her, but obviously, as we all do, she must take this journey alone.
Megan Abbott's writing feels hurried, with an undercurrent of anxiety and tension... I think the run-on sentences, the lack of conjunctions, makes you always feel that you should be pushing ahead into waters that are murky and uncomfortable.
Running so hard, her breath stippled with pain to go faster, hit the grass harder, move forward faster, like she could break through something in front of her, something no one else saw.
See what I mean?
I strongly believe that books are different for people depending on what time of their life they read them in. If I had read this book four, five, six years ago, I think the haunting plot and gorgeous prose would have moved it to the top of my favorites list. But now I'm a mom - a mom of a little girl who will have to navigate this world, full of pain, and sickness, and sex. And I will give her all the guidance and love I can, but she will eventually be thirteen, and she will eventually have to confront all the horribleness that is out there, and it makes me sick to my stomach.
So I gave it a very conflicted three stars.
dark
emotional
hopeful
mysterious
sad
tense
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
I love Megan Abbott. She writes about such twisted, flawed people. I enjoyed listening to this book but there are some very disturbing parts in the character's thought processes. There were times where I literally said out loud, "WHAT? What is she thinking?? Why would she say or think this!?" The writing is good.
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
tense
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
I take it that this has a lot of bad reviews because readers didn't like the subject matter. Seems like one-starring a murder mystery because "murder is bad, people!"
I felt this was very well-written, loaded with description, heavy with feeling, but not in a way that felt overwritten or purple. It's not a whodunnit, it's sort of a why-dunnit. Thirteen year old Lizzie's best friend Evie disappears after school one day, and suspiscion falls on a local man whose car Lizzie saw driving by twice when they were together. The majority of the book is about Lizzie's emotional life in the wake of Evie's disappearance, and her relationship with Evie's family, who lives next door. Lizzie manages to find some clues that the police missed, but she lies about how she obtained that information. She becomes weirdly close with Evie's father, who in turn had been weirdly close with Evie's 16-year old sister, Dusty. Dusty is acting pretty weird after Evie's disappearance, does she know more than she's saying?
This book condensed all the gross feelings and confusion of being a tween girl and dumped it into a book I really couldn't look away from. May bump this up to five stars later if I'm still thinking about it.
I felt this was very well-written, loaded with description, heavy with feeling, but not in a way that felt overwritten or purple. It's not a whodunnit, it's sort of a why-dunnit. Thirteen year old Lizzie's best friend Evie disappears after school one day, and suspiscion falls on a local man whose car Lizzie saw driving by twice when they were together. The majority of the book is about Lizzie's emotional life in the wake of Evie's disappearance, and her relationship with Evie's family, who lives next door. Lizzie manages to find some clues that the police missed, but she lies about how she obtained that information. She becomes weirdly close with Evie's father, who in turn had been weirdly close with Evie's 16-year old sister, Dusty. Dusty is acting pretty weird after Evie's disappearance, does she know more than she's saying?
This book condensed all the gross feelings and confusion of being a tween girl and dumped it into a book I really couldn't look away from. May bump this up to five stars later if I'm still thinking about it.
dark
mysterious
tense
fast-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated