Reading time: 3 days. 

Star Rating: 2 stars

I really wanted to like this book. I did. But it was rough. The plot sounded good enough and the small synopsis on the jacket made it mysterious enough that I wanted to know what happened. 

A Void the Size of the World is about a girl named Rhylee, who has lived her life in her sister, Abby's, shadow. Abby is a track star and basically the star of the town. And then she disappears, because of Rhylee.

Rhylee kissed her sister's boyfriend, Tommy, who is also Rhylee's childhood friend and she's been in love with him for most of their friendship. However, he dates her sister after Rhylee rejects him.

The high school is at this bonfire in the woods somewhere and Tommy and Rhylee end up kissing for the second time, but this time Abby catches them. After a short fight with them, she runs into the woods and disappears. 

That's basically the book right there. A girl disappears and never comes back. The biggest problem I had with this book, is there is absolutely no closure. Abby disappears, her family crumbles and loses who they are as they look for and mourn Abby. But, that's all. They never find out what exactly happened to Abby and why she never came back. 

The police find a sweatshirt in the woods she ran into, footprints by the side of the river that matched a shoe at the bottom of the lake they searched later. So, her family as well as the cops assume she fell and ended up in the lake? 

And Rhylee basically lies her way through the whole. damn. book. Neither she or Tommy told the cops about why Abby ran off into the woods. Even when Tommy is blamed for what happened to Abby and the whole school turns against him, Rhylee says nothing. She keeps lying and feeling sorry for herself, because she blames herself for what happened to her sister. It's hard to root for her when she just keeps on lying to literally everyone she knows and shuts them all out, even Tommy. And then when he wants to leave to get away from it all, she has the audacity to beg him to stay. 

And then there's crop circles that show up, making it seem that something paranormal happened to Abby, which later you find out was just her cross-country team trying to make some kind of tribute to her. But, after they show up, weird things happen to Rhylee where she's chasing figures in the dark and posters from her wall are torn down that are again, unexplained and completely unresolved. 

I kept reading this book because I just wanted to find out what the hell happened to Abby and in hope she would make it home, but no. No closure. No happy ending. Absolutely no satisfaction. Nothing. Just a completely open ending where Abby's family all of the sudden turns everything around in the last chapter and accepts the fact that she's not coming back after 83 chapters of denial.

That's the other thing I will vent about. There's 84 chapters in this book. There's not even 400 pages, and there's 84 chapters. I just thought that it was so excessive and the chapters were so short, it became annoying. At first, I liked the fact the chapters were short, because I felt like I was making my way through the book pretty quickly, but it got old fast. Some chapters were literally a paragraph and a lot of them were choppy. 

There was a lot of repetitiveness to the writing as well, which I did not take into consideration for the rating, but I will still talk about it. Lots of scenes were repeated where Rhylee felt sorry for herself and wouldn't stop blaming herself for what happened to her sister. Scenes and lines were repeated throughout the whole book. There were sentences almost word for word that were repeated. It would have been a little better if they were a few chapters apart (which, in this case, could have been like five pages), but they were two pages apart, the exact same sentence and phrasing, word for word. I know it's difficult to write, but that shouldn't happen with any book. That's just my opinion though, which is why I didn't reflect it in my rating, just my review. 

Anyway, if you want to be frustrated, annoyed and completely unsatisfied, this is the book for you.