Title: Lost Girls
Author: Merrie Destefano
Genre: Young Adult, Mystery
Age Group: Young Adult
Rating: 2 stars
Purchase: Amazon
Review copy provided by the publisher in exchange for an honest review.
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
The concept behind Lost Girls is ambitious, I’ll give the author that. The writing is all right. But the whole plot just isn’t very believable. I’ve read fantasy novels that are more believable than this one.
Rachel used to be a normal girl. She went to sleep listening to Taylor Swift, worrying about geometry, and then she woke up in a ditch, bloodied, bruised and missing a year of her life. And in that year, she’s somehow managed to become popular, she wears nothing but black, and she turned into the female version of Chuck Norris.
On top of that, she’s not the only girl who went missing last year, she’s just the only girl who came back… Desperate to unravel what happened to her, she goes on a quest to find out who she truly is, and the more she discovers, the more her memories return and her old life calls back to her.
So there are several things wrong with this book. Rachel starts out like a normal girl, then gets attack in a bathroom at school and goes all Chuck Norris meets The Karate Kid. Add to that the fact that unlike The Karate Kid she doesn’t really train all day, she magically seems to transform into a fighting machine. There’s some drug involved too, but a lot of folks are taking that drug and Rachel is just the baddest of them all.
The Rachel we meet at the start was a believable character, a typical teen, and I might even have liked her. But then she completely transforms into the queen bee, going out to raves, doing drugs, fighting, and it’s just… it’s meh. She’s not likeable. She’s not even believable. She keeps up her good grades while going out to raves every night? Yeah, right. She’s so mean everyone likes her? Hmm.
The secondary characters aren’t much better. None of them rise above their stereotypes, the sidekick girls, the angsty love interest. They’re all not really realistic, not believable, not likeable either.
Also, Rachel somehow turns out to be better than an FBI agent and an ex-marine (her Dad). Hmmmm. Right.
My number one thought while reading was “really? you really want me to believe this?” And that’s not good.
So, all in all, the writing was okay, but the characters were neither likeable nor realistic, and the plot was completely unrealistic.
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