Review by The Mole
Roe is your average15 year old. Living in Chicago she has all the worries of your average teenage girl: school, boyfriends and friends starting to do less than normal things. Until, that is, her father just disappears. Well, her adopted father because her mother died many years ago. It's then that she finds out many things about her father, herself and her friends. Things that will change her life forever.
I had expected this book to become a whodunnit or a thriller or a romance but it isn't. So what is it? Well... that is difficult to explain. It's a journey for Roe. A sad one, an angry one and one of learning and growing.
I found this book to be extremely engaging and well told. It's written from inside Roe's head so we jump from the present to the past without so much as a 'by your leave' but that, after all, is the way we think so why shouldn't Roe? But it's by this technique that we get to feel so much of what Roe feels. There are happy moments but these are mostly memories although we get to experience just about every other emotion going.
I can imagine this book being read and enjoyed by older readers as well as the YA market and even more mature teens. But when I say enjoyed then I mean really enjoyed.
I found this book to be brilliant and a disappointment to finish - do you know that feeling when you have to start reading about something at a totally different pace and mood? It's described as 'An extraordinarily assured début' and for once I agree with a jacket comment. Another comment suggests 'beautiful' but I am afraid that word is too weak and watery.
It does brilliance in spades!!
Publisher - Freight Books
Genre - Contemporary Fiction
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