R.I.P. Alan Thicke ~ 1947 – 2016

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Alan Thicke

There is a finite end to this life and we’re all going to face it and a little silliness can help.

Lost Girls ~ By Merrie Destefano – 4.5 Stars

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Amnesia, Contemporary Fiction, Drug Abuse, Friendships, PTSD, Slavery, YA Fiction

Thanks to NetGalley and Entangled Teen for providing an eARC in exchange for an honest review.

Release Date: January 3rd, 2017

360 Pages

Synopsis: Yesterday, Rachel went to sleep listening to Taylor Swift, curled up in her grammy’s quilt, worrying about geometry. Today, she woke up in a ditch, bloodied, bruised, and missing a year of her life. 

She doesn’t recognize the person she’s become: she’s popular. She wears nothing but black.

Black to cover the blood.

And she can fight.

Tell no one.

She’s not the only girl to go missing within the last year…but she’s the only girl to come back. She desperately wants to unravel what happened to her, to try and recover the rest of the Lost Girls.

But the more she discovers, the more her memories return. And as much as her new life scares her, it calls to her. Seductively. The good girl gone bad, sex, drugs, and raves, and something darker…something she still craves–the rush of the fight, the thrill of the win–something she can’t resist, that might still get her killed…

The only rule is: There are no rules.

Lost Girls is being hyped as a cross between Black Swan and Fight Club, and while such comparisons often irk me, in this case it’s entirely on the mark. Even more, the story is actually better than what the intriguing premise suggests. I started reading this around 7:00 last night and couldn’t put it down until I had reached the end in the wee hours of the morning! The story begins with a dirty, bloody, and battered Rachel pulling herself out of a roadside ditch and basically throwing herself in front of passing motorists to get them to stop. It’s the type of opening that immediately grabs you, and from there the pace never slows down. Rachel is one of the most intriguing characters I’ve read this year. She has a powerhouse of a personality and I became completely invested in finding out what happened to her. The romance between her and Dylan is not your typical one which made me like it even more. I also loved her interactions with her close knit family, especially her younger brother and her Navy Seal father. Which brings me to my only slight criticism. Rachel’s mom is a nurse, and her father a war hero who’s seen plenty of combat, yet once the mystery of what Rachel’s been doing the past year is fully revealed, I found it a little hard to accept that her loving parents didn’t know or at least suspect what was happening. But this is a very small complaint in what is otherwise an outstanding novel. The imagery is incredibly detailed from that first scene to the very last. More than once I felt as though I was in the story experiencing everything the characters were. There’s a lot of themes at play here: amnesia, PTSD, slavery, drug abuse, etc. but it’s all combined into the mesmerizing storyline in a completely believable way. Technically Lost Girls is a YA book, but honestly, it could easily pass as one for adults and it’s one I highly recommend!