Curiously uninvolving

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chrissie Avatar

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I really enjoyed my first look at this book and was looking forward to reading it but somehow it fell short of expectations. Almost 20 years ago a 6 year old girl went missing in a storm and was rescued three days later from a storm drain following a monumental effort by volunteers from the community of Widow Hills and elsewhere. The subsequent pressure on Arden and her mother lead Arden to change her name and move far away from the local community becoming estranged from her mother. Now as the 20th anniversary approaches, it looks as if the past has come to haunt her again as her childhood susceptibility to sleepwalking suddenly returns and she begins to suspect that journalists are stalking her.
There are a number of red herrings and characters who are not what you might imagine them to be. The usual neat romantic tropes are subverted
( which is not a criticism) but I found it hard to care what happened to her. I suppose we’re not cannot criticise a book like this for being far-fetched but there did seem to be some very flimsy motivations. It was moderately enjoyable but not ‘unputdownable’