Sixteen-year-old Mara Dyer awakes in a hospital with no memory of surviving the terrible accident that killed her best friend, boyfriend, and weaselly frenemy. The trauma causes her family to move to Florida, but now Mara is hallucinating her dead friends, and additional inexplicable deaths are piling up around her. Also, there's a cute guy.
This book made me feel old. Poor Noah, I can see how teenage me could have found him totally swoonworthy, but mid-twenties me is just not having it. It is neither believable nor attractive when a seventeen-year-old boy orders for his date in perfect Spanish without even allowing her to look at the menu. On their first date! He doesn't know what she likes! What if she had allergies? What's with the single-minded pursuit of her, anyway? Where are his other friends, his hobbies, evidence of a life or inner monologue in existence before the new girl became his raison d'etre? I suppose this is my psyche's indication that I am moving away from teenagerhood and creeping closer to potential mother-of-teenagerhood (perish the thought!), so maybe that made me extra grumpy, but still! No teenager is this suave. No human on earth could be this suave. The romance comprises a major portion of this story, and I just couldn't believe it because this guy is more unreal than Mara's hallucinations.
I was also a little weirded out that all the warnings of playerism from platonic token-of-all-trades friend Jamie were summarily ignored and then banished from the book without further regard, along with poor Jamie himself, whose only purpose seemed to be the thankless chore of tutoring our heroine in Spanish and algebra.
It was a quick read, and I liked Mara's relationship with her family. Her struggles to deal with her recovering memories and the aftermath as well as her best friend's death were engaging.
I don't know if I can stick with this through the whole series, but I do feel compelled to read at least the sequel at some point. Damn you cliffhanger ending! B-/C.
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