Review & Guest Post: Lost Girls by Merrie Destefano

Yesterday, Rachel went to sleep listening to Taylor Swift, curled up in her grammy’s quilt, worrying about geometry. Today, she woke up in a ditch, bloodied, bruised, and missing a year of her life.

She doesn’t recognize the person she’s become: she’s popular. She wears nothing but black.

Black to cover the blood.

And she can fight.

Tell no one.

She’s not the only girl to go missing within the last year…but she’s the only girl to come back. She desperately wants to unravel what happened to her, to try and recover the rest of the Lost Girls.

But the more she discovers, the more her memories return. And as much as her new life scares her, it calls to her. Seductively. The good girl gone bad, sex, drugs, and raves, and something darker…something she still craves—the rush of the fight, the thrill of the win—something she can’t resist, that might still get her killed…

The only rule is: There are no rules.

Kindle Edition, 360 pages

Expected publication: January 3rd 2017 by Entangled: Teen 

Genre: YA contemporary/YA psychological thriller/YA dark contemporary

Kristine's Thoughts:

** I received an advanced readers copy from Entangled Teen in exchange for an honest review. Thank you!**

Lost Girls is one of those books where the less you know going in the better. The synopsis gives enough of an indication of what it is about and I feel like that is enough. For that reason, I won't re-tell the story. Intrigued? I certainly was and I knew nothing more than the little blurb before getting started.

This book captured me and sucked me in from the very first page. I am not exaggerating when I say this. I took Lost Girls with me on the treadmill, a task I often do to break up the monotony of exercise, and the next thing I knew an hour had passed. Not only did I not notice the time while I read on the treadmill, I also covered so many pages in the book that I was beyond the point of productivity for anything else. Life was going to get ignored for a few hours so that I could find out what happened. I absolutely had to know what happened to Rachel. Where was she? Why was she missing a year of her life when she was gone less than two weeks? What happened in that year? I was so intrigued that I was forced (not literally) to continue reading to find my answers.

This book was dark, gritty and mysterious with really great writing but still managed to cover the other aspects that the YA audience loves so much. There was the family and friend angle, high school angle and a young love angle that teens will be sure to devour. I am quite a few years removed from the intended audience and I was still able to appreciate and enjoy all the different sides to this story. Destefano did an amazing job of tying it all together and creating a story that will appeal to multiple groups of people.

This was the first book by this author for me but it certainly won't be the last. I thoroughly enjoyed her style of writing and I feel that many others will too.  Lost Girls was one of those books where all you need to do is read the first page to get hooked!

Guest Post

 By Merrie Destefano

My Top 5 Favorite Teen TV Shows

It doesn’t matter what age you are, there’s nothing quite like a coming-of-age drama that deals with universal themes. We’ve all struggled with first love, peer pressure, taking tests, worrying about grades, and dealing with teachers who may or may not be your nemesis. The list below contains five of my favorite, classic, coming-of-age dramas, perfect for binge-watching.

1.    Friday Night Lights
Set in Texas, this teen drama starring Taylor Kitsch and Kyle Chandler is the first program of any kind that actually made me care about football. Why? Because I got that invested in the characters. If you haven’t seen this, I say put it on your Netflix watch list. Just make sure you leave yourself time for binge watching, because it will happen.

2.    My So-Called Life
This might be one of the teen dramas that made me want to want to write YA. The dialogue. The drama. The angst. It all felt so real. It could have been the fact that super-actress Claire Danes headed up the cast and the screen just comes to life when she’s on. Or it could have been that visceral pang of first crush/first love she experiences every time she saw Jared Leto.

3.    Roswell
An alien boy falls for an earthling girl. That might not sound like much to go on when writing a TV series, but whoa, the chemistry between Jason Behr and Shiri Appleby could light your television on fire. Alien Max (Behr) is willing to sacrifice everything in the first episode when Liz (Appleby) is shot. Now that’s what I call love.

4.    The 100
Let’s put 100 teens in space, then put them in prison for petty crimes, and then get rid of them all by sending them to a hostile planet. But wait, that hostile planet is earth. Sign me up, I’m watching this. Every. Week. The adversarial chemistry between Clarke (Eliza Taylor) and Bellamy (Bob Morley) is steamier than the misty Pacific Northwest climate.

5. The Vampire Diaries
Which vampire boy does Elena like best, Damon or Stefan? It doesn’t help that the boys are brothers or that she just lost both of her parents. My main complaint with this lovely show is that it didn’t follow the book close enough. I always voted for Damon (duh), which is who she ends up with in the first book, The Vampire Diaries: The Awakening by L.J. Smith.

 

About the Author

Born in the Midwest, magazine editor Merrie Destefano currently lives in Southern California with her husband, two German Shepherds, a Siamese cat, and the occasional wandering possum. Her favorite hobbies are reading speculative fiction and watching old Star Trek episodes, and her incurable addiction is writing. She loves to camp in the mountains, walk on the beach, watch old movies, and listen to alternative music-although rarely all at the same time.

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