One of Us Is Gone, by Shauntel Anette, AUG 2023 LTER
Talk Reviews of Early Reviewers Books
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1LyndaInOregon
Not every book is going to ring the bell for every reviewer, and this is one of them. Part of the problem may be that the reviewer and the target audience here are miles (and decades) apart.
Basically, this is intended to be a whodunnit dealing with the disappearance of a college student, and the attempts of her two best friends to figure out what happened. In reality, it’s a whole lot of who is sleeping / who has slept / who would like to sleep with whom, larded throughout with a great deal of middle school Mean Girl padding. There's also a fair amount of psychological drama going on close to the surface, as each member of the trio is dealing with some heavy-duty issues of their own.
Sarah, Cleo, and Milton have been friends since elementary school, but at this point in their lives, the friendship has become more toxic than supportive. Sarah’s disappearance brings an unrelenting and unforgiving microscope to bear on the complex relationships among them. The author’s decision to split the narrative between two timelines and two POV characters was doubtless intended to draw out the suspense, feeding crumbs of information to the reader. What it does in reality is to slow the action to a crawl as Cleo plods around the same dreary circuit of frenemies, trying to put together the disturbing and depressing truth.
The whole thing is capped with an utterly bizarre ending that will leave most readers perplexed, though not necessarily uninformed.
Basically, this is intended to be a whodunnit dealing with the disappearance of a college student, and the attempts of her two best friends to figure out what happened. In reality, it’s a whole lot of who is sleeping / who has slept / who would like to sleep with whom, larded throughout with a great deal of middle school Mean Girl padding. There's also a fair amount of psychological drama going on close to the surface, as each member of the trio is dealing with some heavy-duty issues of their own.
Sarah, Cleo, and Milton have been friends since elementary school, but at this point in their lives, the friendship has become more toxic than supportive. Sarah’s disappearance brings an unrelenting and unforgiving microscope to bear on the complex relationships among them. The author’s decision to split the narrative between two timelines and two POV characters was doubtless intended to draw out the suspense, feeding crumbs of information to the reader. What it does in reality is to slow the action to a crawl as Cleo plods around the same dreary circuit of frenemies, trying to put together the disturbing and depressing truth.
The whole thing is capped with an utterly bizarre ending that will leave most readers perplexed, though not necessarily uninformed.
