Review Detail

Everyone says June’s former best friend Deliah meant to kill herself when she set fire to her stepfather’s shed. June can’t accept that. She used to know Deliah better than anyone and she’s certain Deliah was murdered. June sets out to investigate the truth behind what really happened that night but it’s more complicated than she could ever have imagined.

I was really excited to read this book. I love books that mess with you mind and have plot twists that seem to come out of nowhere but the clues were there if you look closely enough. I was all set for this book to blow me away. Maybe my expectations were too high but I didn’t find that it messed with my mind or had jaw-dropping twists.

The book was told mostly through June’s POV. It went back and forth between the present year and flashbacks of June’s childhood friendship with Deliah. All the present chapters were told in first person POV while the flashbacks were in third person, which I found kept me from getting absorbed into the plot. The switching wasn’t really seamless.

It was definitely a trust no one and trust nothing type of book, which I had expected and I liked. It always makes for an interesting reading experience when you can’t trust anything you’re reading. It did feel like there was more emphasis placed on creating shocking moments than developing a lot of the characters. Besides June and Deliah, who didn’t really get much growth either, all the characters were pretty one-dimensional.

The plot had a lot of potential but it tried to do too many things at once and there were times when it felt like it was coming apart. There were a lot of interesting aspects that where never explored. There was, understandably, a lot of focus on the friendship between the girls in the flashbacks to establish why June would be so involved in investigating Deliah’s death, and the reasons why they fell apart.

There were definitely a lot of messed up moments. The Gone Girl comparisons aren’t far off. It was just, with both books, it wasn’t so shocking or messed up when you saw the twists coming.