beingfacetious 's review for:

Panic by Lauren Oliver

4.0

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Oliver's writing style and sense of pacing were great, and her characters were absolutely perfect; their motivations and interior lives were complex and vibrant, their relationships with each other were messy and ever-changing, their dialogue was spot-on. I especially loved Heather and thought her connections with her sister and Bishop and Natalie were sweet and compelling, but really would've loved to feel her connection with Anne more--one more scene between them before

Spoiler

Heather and Lily moved in

would've probably done the trick. There was also a great sense of tension throughout the book with each character and some nice twists, even when things started to seem predictable.

Spoiler

I didn't really feel that the building tension paid off at the end, which was so...nice? I didn't really want anything truly awful to happen, but I sort of expected that it would. I'm so so glad Heather didn't die, for example, but I thought she might at 2 or 3 different points, and I was similarly worried for Natalie a few times, and sort of worried not for Dodge but about him, about what he might do to any of the other three main characters to achieve his goals... Maybe for me this book ultimately suffers from HP-epilogue-syndrome, the authorial desire to write a happy ending for the characters they love when something more open-ended might have been appropriate. The last chapter/scene was sweet and warm, but seemed like a tonal departure from the earlier parts of the book.