Hello Everyone!
I received an ARC from NetGalley in return for an honest review
Overview (Non-Spoliery Section)
This book made me confused. It had a lot of potential that I wouldn’t have seen if I went with my gut and decided not to finish it. I will say, sticking with this novel was a push. I found myself desperately skimming for redeemable qualities. You may be saying, “Jaime, if you didn’t want to finish it, then why did you give it a 2.5 star review?” Well, there will be more info on that in the Spoliery section below, but to sum it up, the end (though there were still major problems with the end) was so much better than the beginning that it redeemed it a little. Being really general with this book is hard but overall, this book is lacking.
***Spoliers***
Well the beginning was incredibly slow and boring. The tensions between Aubrey and Lena never seemed to reach their climax and I couldn’t really buy that Lena would take Aubrey, a girl her boyfriend cheated on her with and who she doesn’t particularly know or like, on a journey to find out what happened. Audrey's big secret with the journal was dragged on for so long and was rather anti-climactic that I didn’t really see much point in it being included. It certainly wasn’t enough motivation for her to go with Lena.
Charlie is a prick the whole time. At first it seems like he might be dead, but that doesn’t last for long. Being the smart reader that you are, you figure out that Charlie isn’t dead pretty close to the beginning. He seemed to me, the whole time, like he made terrible, douchey life choices and then couldn’t deal with them. So then he decides that the only way to escape his life and start over is to kill the people in his “past life.” Ethically, he just blames all of his shortcomings on his girlfriends and then is like “Well, they are smart enough to figure out my terrible attempt to fake my death so they need to die so I can move on (and probably screw some more people over.)” So nothing happens, nothing happens and then BAMB!
About 130 pages into the work, things start to pick up. This made me sad, because if Anne Heltzel would have written the second half of the novel as the whole thing, I would have probably really enjoyed it, considering I really wasn’t bothered by her writing style itself.
-The Ending-
So I sent Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Children's Book Group’s a note and asked if this book had a sequel or more books that were going to be added into this world. The answer, at the moment, is no. Which is sad. Because the book does not end. It drowns you in potential that wasn’t used in the first 260 pages, makes a bunch of crazy crap happen that doesn’t particularly make sense and breaks down all of the logical storyline Heltzel developed.
In the end, the book had so much potential, some of which was attempted to be recognized at the end, and didn’t flourish. Charlie, Presumed Dead succeeds in confusing the reader and leaves them desiring the story that could have been written, rather than the one that was.
Overall
2.5 out of 5
74%
-Jaime