Author: HL_Roberts

Genre: Chicklit

What I liked about this book:

Wow, what an opener. The prologue is really well done, and I loved that the main character's name is Carrie when we are talking about burning down a town. I can tell that she means business, and is angry about something in her past. The descriptions there worked for me and really got me invested right away.

The rest of the book had some good prose, and parts of it were clever, which I always appreciate. I disliked Carrie, and by that I mean I think she's not a very good person, and this portrayal struck me as very intentional. It's hard to make a character that is clearly a bad person the MC without turning off readers with the fact that the MC is a bad person, and the author pulled it off here.

What I did NOT like about this book:

The prose is slogging, and from chapter 5 on is very poorly formatted. I think the author just needs to go through and add the paragraph breaks back because Wattpad's editor likes to eat them, but it bothered me a lot. It also just seems to drag. There's a lot of description, it's very pretty, but it doesn't bounce and it's hard to read. I think some words need to be trimmed because I had a hard time getting through it.

The pacing was way too fast for me. In chapter one we have Carrie already getting together with her former best friend, who both recognizes and believes  her story with no prompting. As a reader, I needed to hear the story for this to work, or at least for there to be some buildup, but there wasn't. I think this chapter could have been three to four and it would have probably worked better.

Same for some of the clever stunts Carrie pulls--there just isn't enough background for them to be clever. How does she know Kristina will be at Fenway? How does she know her boyfriend will get a stomachache? It sounded kind of like she poisoned his food, but it all passed in a blink of an eye and I couldn't tell. 

Also, large portions of this book just don't make any sense. If Carrie grew up in Westchester, how doesn't her best friend and her best friend's mother recognize her? They'd recognize her face even if clothing and hair were different. Did she have plastic surgery? That just left me really confused. 

So did the party scene with the cameras--how did she get them all over her friend's house without her mother noticing? This entire setup also made me feel so far away from the prose it might as well have been in third omniscient, which made me lose interest very quickly. It was trying too hard to be clever. I'd like to see this in bits and pieces so I can put it together by myself.

Overall:

I really wanted this to be good because I was fascinated by the premise, but it just didn't deliver. It's trying too hard to be clever and not giving me enough background details to actually be clever. I'd probably read the next draft, though. 

Rating: 

4/10. I didn't hate it. I wanted more out of it than I got. It's a good idea that deserves to be executed better.