The Last Good Day of the Year by Jessica Warman

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Publication date: 2015
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Pages: 276
My rating: 2 stars
Ages:16+

Early New Year's Day when Sam was 7, her little sister Turtle was kidnapped right in front of her. Ten years later, back in the house where it happened, Sam and her family are still trying to come to terms with what happened--especially since Turtle was never found.

I have to admit that I was really surprised when I looked at the publisher when I started writing this review. I have never read a book published by Bloomsbury that I didn't like. I have never read a book by Bloomsbury that had noticeable typos. But for me, this book was both. Though I suppose you can't expect home runs all the time.

There were a couple of times when the narrator--Sam--would say something to the effect "Just think about it" about something she has just mentioned and I would be sitting there completely in the dark, trying to figure it out. Eventually she would clue me in, a hundred pages later. While the approach was interesting, jumping between times and including snippets of a "book", sometimes things seemed disjointed, random, and hard to follow. The ending seemed a little abrupt, with choices that I suppose I could see someone in that situation make, but that seemed to go against Sam's core beliefs.

In short, what seemed like a good mystery slowly became a pile of misdirection and poorly laid clues.

There was a lot of hard language, drinking, drug use, and sexual references.

*I do not receive compensation from Amazon.