3.5 Stars if I was allowed :)

Ok this book, this book, how do I talk about this book? It's really hard to talk about a book that I had mixed emotions on. Firstly the writing style annoyed me, but by the middle I was used to it and it only bugged me at certain points from there on. It was written very descriptively, beautiful at times, but overdone at others. Adjectives galore!! What started to annoy me the most towards the end was that I realized that without all the descriptions and mood-settings, there wasn't much of a story. Ok an unknown girl was found dead in a small town... another girl was leaving town soon to start college. That's pretty much it. I kept wondering why Becca kept thinking and stressing about the girl that was dead. If she was afraid about there being a killer on the loose, that would make sense. But she seemed to be more focused on the gory details of how the dead girl looked. (She never saw the dead girl, so all the descripitions of milky white eyes staring into nothingness was just her imagination).

At the same time, the book was slightly addicting. I would be so annoyed by a long winded description of how sunlight came into the house choking everything with it's brightness and hearing about all the surfaces it touched, but then if I would stop reading I would be like ok what's going on in that book? It was weird because usually I would not want to go back.

Basically what I'm saying is this was not a book where someone could just walk across the yard and start talking to someone. No, when someone walked across the yard they noticed all the sights and smells and what those sights and smells reminded them of or what their meanings were before they could ever actually get to talk to someone. And somehow most of those descriptions were beautiful. But some of them I could've lived without and had the author increased the plot content.

Becca also confused me in that at first she was pretty eager to get out of this town, but then it was like the fact that there was a dead body found was somehow going to suck her in and she would never be able to leave?? I was a little puzzled. If there was this whole 'who killed the dead girl' drama going on in my town, it would make me want to leave not stay forever. Just because someone you don't know gets killed it's not going affect your life to the point where you feel as though you have no future. I just didn't get it. But I kind of liked that I didn't get it because it gave me something to really think about.

Conclusion: It's a cool book that I would probably have to read twice to fully understand all the little things in it. It's not a light, easy read for sure... more for the writers-reader.

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fiction; murder mystery/suspense/graduating from high school and leaving boyfriend behind. This is classed in the teen section at my library but the sexual content suggests a more mature audience to me (it's not like Danielle Steele or anything, but it is slightly more explicit than the average kissing-and-lying-together scene in teen lit). Anyway--this is a well-layered story with suspense building throughout; would recommend those who demand more substance from their fiction. ( )

This book has been on my TBR for so long, and I finally borrowed a copy from the library. Here is the Goodreads summary:

Becca has always longed to break free from her small, backwater hometown. But the discovery of an unidentified dead girl on the side of a dirt road sends the town – and Becca – into a tailspin. Unable to make sense of the violence of the outside world creeping into her backyard, Becca finds herself retreating inward, paralyzed from moving forward for the first time in her life.

Short chapters detailing the last days of Amelia Anne Richardson’s life are intercut with Becca’s own summer as the parallel stories of two young women struggling with self-identity and relationships on the edge twist the reader closer and closer to the truth about Amelia’s death.

When the story begins, Becca has graduated high school and is getting ready to leave her small town at the end of the summer to go to college. Then her boyfriend sort of breaks up with her after they have sex in the back of his truck, and she’s hurt and confused. Then the next day, the dead body of Amelia Anne is found on the side of the road, setting off the town into gossip and speculation.

As the days unfold, Becca finds that she can’t stop thinking about the dead girl, who hasn’t yet been identified, and she tries to put the pieces together about what happened to Amelia Anne.

Interspersed are chapters showing Amelia Anne’s final days of life, and that’s the part of the book that really got me. She was a young woman on the brink of the rest of her life, about to embark on an exciting path, far different from the one she thought she’d had planned out for her. She was just looking forward to her future so much that I had this knot in my stomach reading about it, about her optimism, because of course I knew how things would turn out for her.

This was not a detective story – Becca didn’t consciously set out to solve a murder mystery and apprehend a killer or anything, but she was affected by the death of this girl she didn’t even know, murdered in her town. As this was happening, Becca’s resolve to get out of her small town wavered, and her on-again relationship with her boyfriend confused her even more. Did she want out anymore? What did her future hold? What about the people she would leave behind?

This was a bleak book, to be honest, but an intriguing story that captivated me. I thought it was well-written, I liked the way the story was told, and I was so wrapped up in the mystery of who Amelia Anne was and how she died.

By the end, when the truth was out and Amelia Anne’s final moments revealed, I felt a bit exhausted, like I had been caught up in everything with Becca and could finally relax. There were a lot of flashbacks, and at times I was a bit confused because the timeline of the story jumped around so much, but Rosenfield found a way to bring it all back together and connect past and present.

I would definitely recommend this book to people who are looking for a gritty, contemporary YA read.

(From www.pingwings.ca) ( )

This came highly recommended. It's well-written, but another example of characters I didn't enjoy. The tone is dark and there's a real sense of bittersweet despair over leaving and not being able to leave a small town. A recent high school honor graduate is on her way to college in the fall, her drop-out boyfriend is resentful that he cannot do the same. Their relationship is emotionally abusive. He breaks up with her immediately after sex and then changes his mind that they should hang out until she moves in the fall...and she goes along with this. But I guess one could argue that the situation is a grim, naive slice-of-life. And then there's the murder. A young girl, Amelia Anne, who no longer has any choice...and how they're connected. ( )

The story itself is okay, but I personally was not a huge fan of the flowery language and wordiness of the writing.

My personal favorite parts were the parts that were from Amelia's point of view. The other parts of the book by Rebecca were where all the wordy parts were and just dragged on forever. I personally did not like Rebecca. She was super annoying.

I did like the suspense set up in the book and I found that once I got into the book I just wanted to keep reading and find out who killed Amelia. I think that there was a fairly good twist that helped tie up the end of the book. ( )