Monday, July 14, 2014

Review: Far From You by Tess Sharpe

Sophie Winters nearly died. Twice.

The first time, she's fourteen, and escapes a near-fatal car accident with scars, a bum leg, and an addiction to Oxy that'll take years to kick.

The second time, she's seventeen, and it's no accident. Sophie and her best friend Mina are confronted by a masked man in the woods. Sophie survives, but Mina is not so lucky. When the cops deem Mina's murder a drug deal gone wrong, casting partial blame on Sophie, no one will believe the truth: Sophie has been clean for months, and it was Mina who led her into the woods that night for a meeting shrouded in mystery.

After a forced stint in rehab, Sophie returns home to a chilly new reality. Mina's brother won't speak to her, her parents fear she'll relapse, old friends have become enemies, and Sophie has to learn how to live without her other half. To make matters worse, no one is looking in the right places and Sophie must search for Mina's murderer on her own. But with every step, Sophie comes closer to revealing all: about herself, about Mina and about the secret they shared.

I'm not a reader of murder mysteries. Yet something about the dark setup here just drew me in! The tag line on the cover reads: "the truth won't let her go." But that's not the half of it. Sophie's palpable desperation to tell the world what really happened is hard to read. She's trapped under the weight of everyone's disappointment. And she knows she deserves it, up to a point. It's horrifying nonetheless.

Wow!

This book jumps back and forth in time, which demands the the reader pay careful attention to the "tags" at the beginning of each chapter, which help anchor the moment in time. But the story is constructed skillfully enough that the non-linear narrative is never annoying. Reading this, I got whiffs of Gillian Flynn's twisty stories. (Although the characters here are FAR more likeable!)

You will feel for Sophie, cry for Mina and want to hug Trev. And the killer? You won't see him coming!