Before the Ruins

This book uses a dual-timelines structure to tell a story about Andy, who is a grown adult lady when we meet her, with a fancy job and disposable income. She gets a sudden call from the mother of her childhood best friend, Peter, whom she's mostly grown apart from over the years, to ask for her help in finding him, as he's disappeared. And then we meet teenage Andy, as she recalls a summer in her late teens when she, Peter, Andy's boyfriend Marcus, and their sweet, artistic friend Em spent time hanging around an abandoned manor house in their rural English hometown. This Andy is half-feral, her alcoholic mother having neglected her through much of her childhood. The book tacks back and forth between these two timelines, one in which adult Andy searches for Peter and the second in which teenage Andy and her friends meet David, who appears out of nowhere at the manor one day. He's their same age, and the group spends the summer playing a game in which they hide fake diamonds around the manor for the others to find, inspired by an actual theft of a diamond necklace at that manor in its glory days, but nothing good can last. Sounds intriguing, right? Alas, this book has so many issues. First and foremost is the completely bananas pacing. Virtually nothing happens for the entire first half of the book, it's all setup. I'm a character-focused reader, so I don't usually mind if “nothing happens”. But the characters don't work either. They feel very thinly sketched, and then we get to the back half and not only does the plot start hurtling forward frantically, the character moments feel like they're trying to cash checks that were never actually written. Very little about the relationship of the characters to each other makes any sense, in either timeline. The prose is fine, a little on the flowery side, which feels almost jarring because it's swinging for these moments of insight and clarity that the book never really earns or even seems to be earnestly seeking. It's so messy that it's hard to identify just one or two things that might have made a positive difference. A big mess.