Girl, Missing
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15
Ratings1
Average rating2
What really happened to Sara-Jane? It's been fifteen years since Gem's eight-year-old daughter Sara-Jane went missing, snatched with her best friend Abby right outside their school. A frantic search united the community at first, but after Abby was found and brought home, single mother Gem's dogged persistence only led to accusations that she was stirring up class tensions. Even that she was somehow involved. When Gem hears that human remains have been unearthed in the school's chapel, she casts aside the new life she's carefully built around herself and returns to the community that closed ranks against her all those years ago. Someone there knows something, she's sure of it. And when Sara-Jane's belongings start appearing on her doorstep, Gem knows she's getting close--dangerously close--to the truth. One thing's for certain: it's not just the remains in the chapel that have lain hidden for years. Can Gem unravel the dark secrets that might lead to Sara-Jane? Or has blind hope lured her into a web she'll never escape?
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This book follows a mother, Gem, whose daughter and her daughters friend went missing 15 years ago. Only one girl comes back, and Gem is left struggling to live her live her life and find a way to understand why her daughter never came back.
I found this book very quick to read but unfortunately didn't enjoy it as much as I had hoped to.
This author does a fantastic job of showing the differences between social classes of the families that attended her daughters school. It also showed some of the prejudices people have towards single mothers, which I felt was portrayed very delicately and effectively. However, i found the unwarranted hatred towards Gem from the community hard to believe, and it stopped me from becoming properly engaged with the book.
I genuinely enjoyed some of the twists this book threw at me, but some of the twists towards the end did feel like they were only written for the shock value and were a bit unbelievable. They didn't add much to the story for me and instead pulled me out of what could have been a great ending.
Unfortunately, i found some of the characters very unrelatable, personally, and therefore found it hard to care about what happened to them. The way some of the characters responded to situations to be unrealistic and whilst the author makes some attempt to explain the reasonings behind these responses, this (I found) was often poorly articulated. I found the reveal of information that was being alluded to, to be very slow and I was left feeling lost at times.
While this book was not personally for me, I feel it would suit someone who enjoys a slower burn of mystery.
This book was given to me by netgalley in exchange for my honest review.
