Missing Dead Girls by Sara Walters

 

Synopsis

    Two girls meet. One is a newbie in town and high school. The other is queen bee of said town and high school. They end up falling in teenage romance spiral the first time they meet each other and unravel all their deep secrets to each other within hours of meeting. And at no point is this seen as a red flag. If you want my advice, don’t ever bare your soul to someone you just met. Or anyone for that matter. But especially not someone you just met! And especially when literally everyone has warned you about them. You’re not special. You’ll get kicked the same way, if not worse, for thinking you were different. 

 

    Anyway, their secrets weren’t all that dark. At least not Tillie’s. Just too much teenage angst leading to very poor decision-making skills.

 

 

Review

 

She (our author) calls it a sapphic thriller. I call it a debut-level novel. Sapphic wannabe. Thriller wannabe. And apparently it also deals with SA but I thought the topic was merely gleamed over in the book. It wasn’t the focal point in any way. 

 

You know a book ain’t all that worth your $12 when I haven’t got much to say about it. And I don’t. For something that somehow categorises as a thriller, it wasn’t all that thrilling. It wasn’t a horrendous read, but not something I would advise anyone to spend on if you can get a loaned copy or don’t want to waste some bucks. 

 

The story had potential, I’ll give it that. There were quite a few typos, but let’s leave that blame on the editor and publisher. The writing in itself was easy and fun to read, like a breeze. Some bombastic lingo, but all of us who don’t know better are guilty of being quite verbose at times. The story was well-written, but like I said, it was just potential that was seen. When you read something and think to yourself that “it has potential”, just know that was wasted and there is no second chance. You have one shot at showing your greatness when someone else is seeing it for the first time, and for me, Sara unfortunately failed at that. Because all I saw was wasted potential. This story could’ve developed in much better ways than it was. Sara Walters spent a great deal of writing on analepses, but the dénouement, the coming together of all those snippets into the girls’ supposed ‘dark past’, was anticlimactic. Weak. 

 

And the Elliot James story was mismatched. At the start of the story, the whole focus was on Madison and Tillie, on this gravesite dollhouse they were renovating (for no reason, as it turned out later on. It had no effect whatsoever on the plot when it could’ve. Missed opportunity), on their entanglement and the depth of their odd relationship that formed on god-knows-what because they got involved after spending less than half a day together. And then suddenly Elliot comes in and the whole narrative changes and Tillie loses all her personality to pursue revenge for Madison, who aside from being queen bee in the beginning, also has no personality, no trait true to herself, and I as a reader is just confused because the flow I was in at the beginning was just broken and now I’m just following this new subplot I had no interest in, and none of the other things I wanted to know more about was given to me. 

 

Allow me to make it better for you, Sara dearest. 

 

You introduced this gravesite a boat ride away from Madison’s parent’s lake house, pointed out those three specific graves of that odd family whose little girl met a tragic end. What you should’ve done is attach it more to your plot rather than just “oh the girl drowned too, Tille’s trigger”. That is not how you deal with adding triggering elements. This was a big part of the book. That “safeplace” they went to all the time. And yet it was misused. Bringing Elliot there and killing him with a screwdriver in his side from the toolbox in the dollhouse was convenience. Nothing led up to it. Also a pro athelete/swimmer built like The Rock wouldn’t just die within five seconds of being punctured in the side with a screwdriver. Every writer needs a doctor friend. Check your facts. Even Elliot’s gun in the scene was pointless. 

 

Anyway, if I go any more into this, you’ll get a book thicker than Missing Dead Girls on how it could’ve been better written, and neither of us has the time for that.

 

Overall, 2.3 stars. Chill read for bored days.

 

Toodles.