This was a very clever idea not well executed.

The entirety of the book appears to be building towards something. We are slowly piecing together (way too slowly, I admit, but hey, I can forgive slow burns if they make it to the point where they become fascinating) what on earth happened, and there is an intriguing concern over memory and how it can lie and trick people.

I won't spoil the ending, not just because I don't do that, but because, in practice, there is no ending to spoil. I have no clue what the point of the book was, really, given nothing was resolved, everything is still a huge horrible mess, and I still have no clue what to believe regarding the missing girl. It's not even that it was left a little up in the air so that the reader could decide themselves. There is no resolution. For anything. There are a huge number of issues and confusions that surface throughout the novel, and in the end none of them are handled.

We have a crop of relationship issues between the characters that have no resolution and are actually not even addressed. We have some confusion over memory which is not handled, and the reasoning behind the confusion of memory is also not handled.

The characters themselves were not terribly interesting without any resolution to what was going on, honestly. They were kind of broken, which is okay if we get something that explains why or fixes it or does something besides leave them broken throughout. There is absolutely no reason to read it, really, since there is no growth, there is no change, there is just stacks of problems that remain there at the end. Not interesting problems, most of them, either: just everyday run-of-the-mill issues that are never handled.

I went in with low expectations for this book, honestly. I wanted to read a missing kid in the woods book for some (probably weird) reason, and this was available at the library. I saw it didn't have great reviews, but I figured hey, I'm interested in the subject matter, how bad can it be.

This bad. Last time I do this, I swear (ignore the fingers crossed behind my back. I know I will do this again.)