"...everybody -- no matter how harmless they seem -- has the capacity to veer outside the lines. It's just a matter of how far they go."
On the night that Abi Knight gets the call informing her that there's been an accident, she rushes to the ER to find her daughter, Olivia, brain dead from severe head trauma leading to irreversible damage incompatible with life. Olivia, 17 years old, is also pregnant. It's then that Abi realizes that she didn't know her beloved daughter as well as she thought and that Olivia had slipped from her control and protection. When the authorities don't seem to be looking at Olivia's fall from the bridge as anything more than an accident, Abi joins up with Anthony Bryant, a victim advocate with the Seattle Police Department to find out what really happened that night. But first, Abi needs to come to terms with her own lies. Even as Olivia remains on life support in order to mature the fetus so that it can be delivered, Abi spends all her time asking questions of those friends who were connected to Olivia. There's so much she doesn't know and she still has to confront her big secret -- Olivia's father. She'd never told Olivia the truth. NO SPOILERS.
If this sounds rather melodramatic to you, then you're not alone in that perception. It is marketed as being for fans of two other books that I read but it is most similar to RECONSTRUCTING AMELIA in my opinion. The author attempts to present a few different scenarios and possibilities for what happened and who might have been responsible, but the tension and suspense that is usually present in a thriller is missing here. The main focus was on how much Abi loved Olivia and the mother-daughter bond. I felt that much of the narrative was quite unrealistic in portraying the thoughts of teenaged Olivia and also the actions of Abi going round questioning friends, etc. I really wanted to like Abi -- as a mother of daughters I could feel empathy for her incipient loss of Olivia, but for some reason her behavior and the things she had done basically annoyed me. And don't get me started on the convenient romantic entanglement. UGH. NO. There were just too many things that irked me so my heartstrings weren't tugged as I don't really enjoy gut-wrenching tales as they seem too contrived to wring out all that emotion. Anyway, the book was a fast read and easy to finish in a single sitting. I guess I'm just not a fan of somewhat manipulative relationship stories as I'm more of a crime fiction and gritty thriller lover.
Thank you to NetGalley and Gallery Books for the e-book ARC to read and review.
This is a standalone and is not part of a series.
Genre - family drama, teen pregnancy, mother-daughter relationship
No comments:
Post a Comment