Read Lost Girls Merrie Destefano Books

Product details Paperback 360 pages Publisher Entangled Teen (January 3, 2017) Language English ISBN-10 163375605X

Lost Girls Merrie Destefano Books Reviews

• I hardly ever pay full price (in this case $5.99) for a digital book. Maybe that's not fair to authors, but putting money out on entertainment isn't a priority for me. I saw Merrie Destefano sharing on Facebook what others were saying about her book, and their comments caught my attention. I enjoy YA/teen books, when they have an edge to them, and this one is a "contemporary thriller". So I took the plunge and bought the book. Despite my large TBR pile, I dove in.
  
  It's a thriller, all right. Just because it's for teens didn't mean it pulled any punches. The story starts with a girl crawling out of a ditch with no memory and stumbling onto a busy road. Nobody would stop for her, so she causes a traffic accident to get people to help her. There's some guts! I liked Rachel already.
  
  Stories with amnesia can be handled well and handled badly. Merrie did a fantastic job. Rachel got her memory back in a way that was both realistic and which ramped up tension and anticipation. When reviewing a thriller like this, I don't want to give away the plot, so here's what I loved, apart from the details of the events
  
  - Rachel is a heroine I could get behind. The amnesia was the reason she came across this way, but what she became to me was the epitome of the human condition half of her was the kind, innocent geek girl who loves her best friend and her family and the other half was the gritty, powerful athlete with no patience for those who defied her and a killer instinct. Her struggle to reconcile these two parts of her was the best part of the book for me.
  
  - I loved the family values. There were plenty of broken families in the story, a reality that matches what we see all around us today. But I loved that Rachel had the love and support of her parents, and even her brother (within brotherly limits, of course).
  
  - High school friendships can be complicated. Sometimes you team up with people you used to despise (or who despised you), sometimes you change and leave good friends behind. It's not always a comfortable landscape. And every kid has a secret, a hidden life, who they really are on the inside. Who they are when they get home. Who they are when they're out with their friends. Who they are when they're alone doing what they truly love. I appreciated that the high schoolers in this story weren't cookie cutter bullies or boyfriends. They were messy, multi-layered people, and the relationships they had were multi-faceted. It makes me want to get to know the people around me better. Maybe they'll invite me to a secret rave once they trust me. (Ha!)
  
  - So many times I hit a moment where Rachel decides to do something and I'm shouting, "Nooooo!" at my because I know she's flying head-on into danger. I love a book that gets me shouting at my . Even if my husband looks at me sideways like I'm a nut.
  
  Hmmmm.... Those are some things I liked, and there's a dozen others I could list, but I wish I could write a review that does justice to the story.
  
  I was hooked from the start, and the pace kept me hooked, constantly wondering what was next. Rachel and her friends will live in my imagination for a long time. There were surprises and layers that I never expected, and by the end of it I was desperate to reach the end but also dreading what I would find there. The ending did NOT disappoint, and I love love love that Merrie wrapped things up like she did.
  
  And yes, I stayed up late to finish the book last night. It's cliche, but it's true.
  
  NOTE I rarely give 5 stars because I want 5 stars to mean this is a book that has become a lifetime favorite, one so good that EVERYONE who reads this genre should read it. “Lost Girls” is an outstanding book -- great writing, good story, I'd re-read it, I really liked it and would recommend it if I felt it might fit a particular reader's tastes.
• I've been anxiously awaiting this book ever since I first saw the (gorgeous) cover reveal. I will say at first it kinda threw me because I had mistakenly thought the book was about a girl with a mental illness, not a girl with amnesia finding out what happened to her during a kidnapping--but I take responsibility for my own misunderstanding. Once I got into the groove of what the story actually was, though, I was so happy with the way it was handled (particularly after having read another teen book some time ago in which a girl mysteriously resurfaces after being kidnapped--one that was handled horribly). Rachel was a character I genuinely liked, someone who truly cared about her family and friends, and even her enemies, but wasn't some unrealistic pollyanna by any stretch. She had real inner demons to face. I particularly loved the relationship between her and her brother.
  
  Ultimately, this story is a mystery, with Rachel trying to figure out what happened to her during the two weeks she was missing, and the year before that which disappeared from her memory because of the two-week kidnapping. The clues were laid out so smoothly, each adding dimension to the story and making it come clear one puzzle piece at a time. Wonderful. Kept me turning pages until the wee hours!
• I am a long-time Merrie Destefano fan. I don't think she's written anything I haven't enjoyed, and though the book Lost Girls is a little different than her previous ones, it still maintains that sense of being a Merrie Destefano book. I saw another reviewer refer to it as "Fight Club meets Mean Girls," which is true enough, but it's also a story about the good girl gone rebel, a human trafficking victim (of sorts), and, Destefano's staple item broken humans engaged with supernatural forces.
  The story begins with a girl in a ditch with no memory of how she got there or the last year of her life. From that point forward, she has to try to figure out what happened, how it happened, and how to prevent it from happening again all while trying to regain her memory and insert herself back into her family life. Even her bedroom doesn't look right.
  It's fast-paced, with all the notes of a high school drama that pan out in thriller-fashion, and spirals to an adrenaline-rushed finish with an iconic ending that I won't spoil.
  Lost Girls came out on January 3rd.
• LOST GIRLS by Merrie Destefano is a deeply engrossing mystery that drops the reader in the middle of nowhere with a character you instantly care for. You desperately want to know more, to help Rachel regain what she’s lost, while at the same time fearing what she might remember.
  
  The writing is glorious and presented in perfect teenage Technicolor. Every character is believable. Every breadcrumb along the path is eagerly devoured by the reader. Every page begs to be turned. Every lead followed. The story is so well done, and so perfectly paced I really couldn’t put it down.
  
  The author has some serious artistic writing skills. There were sentences and paragraphs that were so beautifully constructed I had to go back and re-read them.
  
  This is a story, dark and dangerous, but with a glimmer of hope and the constant possibility of light at the end of the tunnel at every page turn.
  
  A fantastic, easy read! Well done!