The Girl Who Never Came Home really reads more like YA than literary fiction and the tagline of it being a “gripping page turner’ might have been a bit of an oversell, but the overall story was good.
Sixteen-year-old Zoe (daughter of Lydia and baby sister to Jessie) goes away for a weekend at school camp and disappears sometime between lights out and breakfast. It doesn’t take very long for searchers to discover her body. While the police and school try to figure out what really happened, Lydia and Jessie struggle with their mourning, amplified by the earlier death of their husband/father after a cancer diagnosis.
I think this book reads more like a YA book because of the underlying themes of bullying, teenage relationships (both romantic and platonic,) and secrecy/privacy in teenagers’ lives. I like YA and make a point of mixing it into my reading rotation, but I didn’t think that’s what this was supposed to be.
It was interesting how the author told Zoe’s story, balancing her mother’s ideological view of her personality and stories of her kindness to others as a child against the other students’ opinions (including those of her best friends) who saw her as a mean bully. And I thought Jessie’s story as the older “perfect” sister was handled well.
However, I didn’t think it was hard to figure out why Zoe disappeared or who was responsible. With only so many characters in the book, it was easy to see who really didn’t like Zoe and why, so the conclusion wasn’t very shocking.
Disclaimer: I received a copy of this book from NetGalley and Bookouture in exchange for my honest review. It has not influenced my opinion.