After being betrayed by her (ex) boyfriend - Silas - and (former) best friend - Lainey - Jade just wants to get away. Luckily, she's signed up for Campus on Board, a semester-long program at sea, which will hopefully give her the space she needs. Unfortunately, some of the first people she sees when boarding are Silas and Lainey.
Now, Jade can't avoid them, but maybe now she can get some closure? Only if she can get Silas away from Lainey, maybe then she'll be able to ask him what happened between them that he decided to break up with her via text and then promptly block her. It's fair to say that something is not quite right about the situation.
Then, Lainey disappears from her room, and by the looks of it, she didn't leave peaceably. All eyes are on Jade since most everyone knew about the problems between the two girls. If Jade wants to prove her innocence, she'll have to figure out what happened to Lainey and who could have wanted to harm her.
The story starts off with a bang as the opening pages are the discovery of Lainey's very empty (and bloody) room. Right away, I'm pulled in. From there the story slows down a bit as readers are caught up on everything leading up to this opening moment. It kind of puts the breaks on the momentum early on. While I liked getting the backstory, I felt like we could have gotten the information quicker. As it stands, it takes until almost the halfway point in the book to get back to where we started in the prologue.
Once we hit that point, the story moved from "I've been betrayed, I must find out why" to "I need to prove my innocence". It's full of a lot of twists and turns. Some more plausible than others, but honestly I could feel Jade's anxiety and the franticness just jumping off the page. It certainly lends itself well to the thriller portion of the story. We believe in Jade's innocence, and Jade is adamant about her innocence almost to the point that she'll take any crumb of information and run with it to the point where almost everyone becomes a suspect.
One thing that was a bit off-putting to me was the way the characters talk. I felt like it wasn't representative of how real 18 year old's would speak or think. There are other instances that I don't really want to get into because I want to avoid spoilers. But there were definitely revelations that made be take a second look but everyone else had an almost casualness about it, didn't even blink twice. I just found it odd. It's difficult to put this into words. Maybe it was intentional posturing on the part of the author. A commentary on how these kids really are on their own throughout the story and we're seeing them rushed into the adult world with the things they have to deal with.
I'll say the big twist at the end pulled me back into the story and made me very interested as to how everything would play out. I just wish the rest of the story was trimmed down a little bit.
Now, Jade can't avoid them, but maybe now she can get some closure? Only if she can get Silas away from Lainey, maybe then she'll be able to ask him what happened between them that he decided to break up with her via text and then promptly block her. It's fair to say that something is not quite right about the situation.
Then, Lainey disappears from her room, and by the looks of it, she didn't leave peaceably. All eyes are on Jade since most everyone knew about the problems between the two girls. If Jade wants to prove her innocence, she'll have to figure out what happened to Lainey and who could have wanted to harm her.
The story starts off with a bang as the opening pages are the discovery of Lainey's very empty (and bloody) room. Right away, I'm pulled in. From there the story slows down a bit as readers are caught up on everything leading up to this opening moment. It kind of puts the breaks on the momentum early on. While I liked getting the backstory, I felt like we could have gotten the information quicker. As it stands, it takes until almost the halfway point in the book to get back to where we started in the prologue.
Once we hit that point, the story moved from "I've been betrayed, I must find out why" to "I need to prove my innocence". It's full of a lot of twists and turns. Some more plausible than others, but honestly I could feel Jade's anxiety and the franticness just jumping off the page. It certainly lends itself well to the thriller portion of the story. We believe in Jade's innocence, and Jade is adamant about her innocence almost to the point that she'll take any crumb of information and run with it to the point where almost everyone becomes a suspect.
One thing that was a bit off-putting to me was the way the characters talk. I felt like it wasn't representative of how real 18 year old's would speak or think. There are other instances that I don't really want to get into because I want to avoid spoilers. But there were definitely revelations that made be take a second look but everyone else had an almost casualness about it, didn't even blink twice. I just found it odd. It's difficult to put this into words. Maybe it was intentional posturing on the part of the author. A commentary on how these kids really are on their own throughout the story and we're seeing them rushed into the adult world with the things they have to deal with.
I'll say the big twist at the end pulled me back into the story and made me very interested as to how everything would play out. I just wish the rest of the story was trimmed down a little bit.