Author: AmyLea Murphy
Expected Publication Date: November 17, 2020
Publisher: Self-published
Pages: 195
Trigger warnings: Eating disorders, drug use, mental health struggles.
Introduction
Six years ago, Katie's sister Anna disappeared. Katie was 12 at the time, and Anna was 18. Because Katie was so young when Anna disappeared, there was a lot that she didn't understand. Katie has never truly gotten over the disappearance of Anna, and now that Katie is 18, she feels like she's been in the dark about the details about her sister's case for too long, and she begins spending time at her local police station, looking through Anna's files. Through evidence and personal items collected in her police file, Katie soon begins to realize that she maybe didn't know Anna as well as she thought she did.
Format
The story is told almost completely through media found in Anna's police file, like diary entries, transcribed interviews, reports, text messages, and emails. I absolutely love when books use elements like this to tell a story. However, these media pieces took up more of the book than I thought. It is the only way that Anna's story is unraveled. Very little of the story takes place in the present, so we don't see very much of Katie's life as it is now. If I had to estimate, I'd say that maybe 30 pages of the book are dedicated to what Katie is doing in her life, besides sifting through police reports.
Characters
Because most of the story is told through Anna's file and very little of the story is actually focused on Katie, I had a hard time caring about her. We don't learn very much about her personality besides the fact that she harbors a lot of anger, about what happened to her sister and otherwise.
From the little that we do see of Katie in her personal life, I found her to be annoying. She was written more like a 14-15 year old than an 18 year old. She has very childish tendencies that I wouldn't expect somebody of that age to have, such as almost run her car off the road when she had a passenger that was only trying to help her, lashing out when she's asked about college, or stealing a customer's smoothie when she got fired from her job. In a way, I am sort of glad that most of the book was just sifting through Anna's file at the police station, because Katie is set up to be a very annoying protagonist.
Just as I didn't learn enough about Katie to care about her, I also didn't learn enough about Jack, Katie's neighbor and love interest, to care about him or their budding romance.
Plot
There were some parts of the book that I felt were never actually resolved or fully developed. There were several instances where a falling out was mentioned between Anna and her father, but what the rift was about was never disclosed. Since the falling out apparently played such a big role in her emotional turmoil, I would have liked to have known what actually happened.
Spoilers ahead!
I feel like I was a little bit mislead plot-wise in general. For the entire book, it seems that Katie and her family don't know where Anna is/what happened to her, but when the ending comes, it is apparent that they do know what what happened to her/where she is, but they don't know why she ended up how she did. I understand why it had to be written that way, but because the official synopsis of book seems to allude to a bit more of a mystery, finding out that all the characters knew Anna's fate all along felt a little anticlimactic.
Conclusion
This book was okay, but I probably wouldn't pick it up again due to the lack of character depth and slightly disappointing ending, but it was okay and is suitable if you're just looking for a quick read that has the interesting elements of diary entries, emails, text messages, etc.
