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Thursday, 24 May 2018

One Was Lost by Natalie D. Richards

I was so disappointed by this book! I mean look at that gorgeous cover. To be fair, I had forgotten this book was YA going into it so I was expecting more of an actual thriller tone. You can definitely tell that this is a YA book. I also found the first few chapters incredibly hard to get into. Something about the writing style and the way things are introduced is very messy at the start and I was a bit confused until I got settled into it.

Apart from that slight niggle, this really isn't a badly written book in terms of style. The characters were fairly interesting and I was intrigued anytime the story chose to focus on them. Unfortunately, the big weakness of this book is the thriller aspect. I'm not going to spoil anything but the ending is incredibly obvious and it's almost painful how long it takes the main characters to work things out. There are the obvious double-meaning conversations where characters will not say things properly, so the main character will jump to a conclusion which you know as the reader is going to turn out to be false because the conversation was so vague.

The existence of the other camp is a factor I think was greatly underused. It does show up in the plot eventually but only to provide some new suspects, which are promptly abandoned a few pages later. Further exploration of this would have helped the story and potentially made the actual solution a lot less obvious. This also applies to the side characters as well come to think of it. Each character is kind of developed in turn, briefly becomes a suspect and then is pushed to one side. It's a shame because they really had the potential to be interesting characters.

Alas I don't really have much more to say about this book. I may explore other titles from this author because there was nothing wrong with the writing style or the characters, and she may have the potential to write better stuff with a different plot. Sadly the failure of a compelling mystery is too big a flaw for me to ignore.

Overall Rating:
.5

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