Don't Try to Find Me by Holly Brown

Don't Try To Find Me by Holly Brown
Fiction

Rachel comes home from work to find a note in her kitchen from 14 year-old daughter Marley: don't try to find me. Rachel dropped Marley off at school in the morning but no one has seen her since. She calls her husband, Paul, and the two start making calls including the police. With a history of high anxiety, Rachel doesn't handle this too well and the cops suspect she may have something to do with Marley missing. Paul decides to go to social media and start a massive online campaign to find Marley. Told from the perspective of both Rachel and Marley, we get both sides of the story.

There are many pieces to this book that makes it an interesting read. For me, I was surprised at how little I cared for the characters though I still felt somewhat sympathetic to them because of the tension Brown created with what may have driven Marley away. Rachel was annoying and a little hard to believe due to her inaction. For someone that has an anxiety problem, she was very perceptive about her relationship but completely oblivious in other areas. Without spoiling anything, we learn of one item about Rachel that drove Marley away and it was a complete shocker. There was very little in the book, until about 50 pages before revealed, that even hinted at this being a problem. Despite these annoyances, Rachel was a great medium for walking the reader through what a parent may think when their kid runs away. The other main character is Marley. Again, I wasn't her biggest fan because it felt like she may have run away for very little reason and I don't have patience for that. Despite this, she came off as rather mature for a 14 year old and able to handle herself in adverse situations.

What this book really excelled at was making the reader's mind work in overdrive to figure out why Marley ran away. With each revelation I was wondering who could have done what to whom and what the final reason for the family abandonment was. That said, once the real reason was finally provided, because my mind had been working so hard to come up with all of these reason, I felt like it was a bit of a let down. I expected the reason to be larger than it was.

This book was a page-turner and had interesting character narration. I just would have liked the author to push the envelope a bit more on the conclusion because the journey didn't equate to the end result.

Thank you to TLC Book Tours for letting me be a part of this tour!

First Line: "Don't try to find me."

Rating:
(3.5/5)