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What if everything you thought you knew about your life was a lie? Lauren is adopted and eager to know more about her mysterious past. But when she discovers she may have been snatched from her family as a baby, her whole life suddenly feels like a sham. Why will no one answer her questions? How can she find her biological parents? And could her adoptive parents really have been responsible for kidnapping her? Running away from her family to seek out the truth, Lauren's journey takes her deeper and deeper into danger as she realises that someone wants to stop her uncovering what really happened when she was a baby... at any cost... A nail-biting YA thriller from the bestselling author of Close My Eyes 'Page-turning' The Independent 'Will have you gripped for hours' Sunday Express 'Please read this book: it is brilliant!; The Guardian 'Whenever I hear the phrase YA thriller I only ever think of one name - and that's Sophie Mckenzie. Why? Because noboody does it better' Phil Earle, award-winning author 'Sophie's thrillers are brilliant... you can't stop reading' Robert Muchamore, bestselling author 'Brilliantly described, scary and touching' The Daily Mirror 10 YEARS OF AWARDS FOR Girl, Missing Manchester Children's Book Awards Bolton Children's Book Award Soilhill Book Award Winner of the Sakura Medal Red House Children's Book Award Richard and Judy Best Kids' Book Lewisham Children's Book Award… (more)
User reviews
I tend to find Young Adult books by British authors to be pretty uninteresting and honestly quite boring.
While I like the story well enough, I found it all to be a little juvenile and not really worth a second look.
My main problem with this book would have to be that I just did not once believe the story. In the first few chapters Lauren finds out that she might have been snatched from her biological parents instead of properly adopted like she was led to believe. All this because she stumbled upon a website for missing children and when entering her birthday, became obsessed with the though of the kid on the screen being her, to the point where she convinces her mum to take one last family holiday to America so she can visit the adoption agency her parents got her from and see if she's right or not. Come on, does that really sound like it would bloody happen? I mean for starters it should have taken months to convince her mum but it didn't, she flew out within the month (or so) and everything she planned just seemed to fall in to place.
Now it wasn't just the lack of believable storyline that got to me, the characters did to. Not only was Lauren a unrelatable character, but she was selfish, very self centred and at times disrespectful to the people who had brought her up. All she cared about was finding her 'real parents' and yeah, her and her mum and dad my not have got a long over the past few years but that's called a family. It is in no way shape or form a reason to justify a crusade to find people to replace them with. She never thought about the consequence of her actions or what she would do if everything turned out to be true, she didn't think about her best friend who was on the trip with them and how his mother would be feeling when they disappeared in America. She just didn't care because she wanted to do what she wanted to do , and she didn't like what she found.
Everything about this book moved to fast and didn't flow. I felt like Sophie McKenzie had put way to much time in to creating a back story and not enough into the development of her characters. I hate giving a book a bad review, its really not something I enjoy, even more since I can remember seeing it in the book stores when I was a teenager, and passing it up for fantasy books but hoping one day I would actually get around to reading it. Like I said, sadly I was just disappointed.
I'll be honest, I'm not looking forward to the next one. I know I'll read it at some point but I'm not rushing to. I will however try something else of Sophie's, because I don't think she should ignore an author because of one bad book. If anyone has read anything else by her that they can suggest to me I would be very grateful.
Although this book had action from the start, it never really appealed. I found Lauren to be immature, selfish and reckless, and ignorant of the concern her actions caused others. The only characters I liked were Jam, Lauren's best friend, and Lauren's younger sister Madi. The plot was too