All the Missing Girls: A Novel

Did not see that coming. First 1/4 of the book is choppy. Then it starts rolling. Great story. He timeline was hard to get use to, once I did it was awesome.

This is a good book overall. However, I hate the backwards writing style the author used. If done better I could see how it might be a good...trick or gimmick. It's just hard to follow a timeline a large part of the time. Events are often repeated because it happens today, but next section goes back to yesterday and blends in with events that happened on today. See? Confusing. Maybe it was just me. I just believe the story would have been much better following a non-gimick writing method.

This book follows the life of Nicolette, who returns to her hometown to help her brother prepare their family home for sale while her father is ill and suffering from dementia. The book is told backwards, from day 15 (after her return) to day 1, which forces you to piece together the puzzle that is the reason behind Nic avoiding her home for the last decade. When her neighbor, who is conveniently enough her ex-boyfriends new fling, goes missing, all fingers are pointed at her and its up to Nic to figure out what happened all those years ago to her best friend and now to her neighbor. Were they kidnapped? Were they killed? Are the two missing girls cases related? She comes to realize that the secrets kept by the town are far more sinister than she had ever imagined. • • • Whilst I enjoyed the book, it didn’t have a huge wow factor for me aside from when everything came to unravel and the truth came out. Although this isn’t going to the top of the chart for me, it was still a good read and one that I may consider reading again but this time working from the back of the book (day 1) to the beginning of it (day 15). I did enjoy the fact that the way this book was written was very original because it kept me entertained for the most part and had me guessing what exactly went on.

I was totally engrossed from the get-go with this novel. Fabulous. Like another reviewer, I too was initially hooked by the book cover. This is a review whereby I again find myself saying 'stop comparing to novels to Gone Girl and Girl on the Train' - this is a stand alone thriller not to be compared to any other. I could NOT put this down. I read WAY too late into the night/after midnight hours, I found myself doing something I NEVER do: picking my Kindle up to continue at odd moments during the day when I wanted to spend a little 'relaxing' time. The novel told 'in reverse' definitely adds to the entire drama of the story....be patient! It's worth it.I am a huge 'highlighter' - those philosophical thoughts put down by the author, a unique/interesting/captivating way of explaining something, things that make me literally stop my reading and stare into space digesting what I just read - it's visceral - I highlighted more in this novel than any other. I LOVE how this author writes. I'm hoping my following examples of what I highlighted help portray what I mean - I think sentences/passages put down by the author in this novel were of equal value to the amazing story.Examples to whet the appetite:"I knew that voice like twelve years of history filed down into a single memory, a single syllable.""He wasn't losing his mind, he was just lost within it. There was a difference. I lived in there. TRUTH lived in there.""He looked up, his blue eyes watery, slippery as his thoughts.""Only a sane person would realize how close he or she was to the edge. Not like my dad, who didn't know when he was teetering too close to that chasm, didn't seem to notice the change in velocity as he went tumbling into the abyss.""The car was too cramped, too hot, and I rolled our windows down, the air running through my hair like a memory I couldn't grasp.""People were like Russian nesting dolls - versions stacked inside the latest edition. But they all still lived inside, unchanged, just out of sight.""Something that had led her here, and she'd seeped into the cavern walls - her bone the smooth rock, her teeth the jagged stone, her clothes disintegrating in the darkness.""But for me, this was scarier. He wasn't clawing for sanity, or fighting for understanding, or raging against the unfamiliar. He was letting go.""The facts. The facts were difficult to see clearly. The facts were like the view from our porch - shadows in darkness and shapes you could conjure up from fear itself.""Nobody would ever love you so fiercely, so meanly, so thoroughly. And the parts of you that you wanted to keep hidden - she loved those most of all.""I think Corinne believed that life could break even somehow. That there was an underlying fairness to it all. That the years on earth were all a game. A risk for a payoff, a test for an answer, a tally of allies and enemies, and a score at the end.""The way he spoke made me think he wasn't from here. Not this town, anyway. An hour east was all it took to make a difference. the mountains and the single winding road kept this place separate, insular.""We had developed a habit after our mother got sick, fighting in the space between words about anything other than what we meant.""I thought of all the little things I'd held on to. All the little things I'd taken with me when I left. A fine, transparent thread leading all the way home.""Her power, I realized, was not limitless, as we had all believed. It had borders, and when she left that house, she refused to give another inch. It was a learned trait: how to push, how to manipulate. She knew the line to walk, She learned that from her father - PUSH BUT NOT TOO HARD; CRACK BUT DO NOT BREAK. The darkness lives in everyone. She knew this better than anyone. Everyone had two faces, and she looked deep into us each until she found it.""There was something both familiar and discomforting about the rain here. In the city, it hit the windows and streets and flooded the gutters, like it was encroaching on us. It caused traffic jams and made apartment lobbies too slippery. But here, the rain was just another part of the landscape. Like it was the thing that lived here and we were merely visitors.""Some religions believe time is cyclical, my father had said. That there are repeating ages. But to others, time is God. A gift for us to stretch out and exist in.""Because the thing about standing here in the middle of the mountains with the rain coming down, in a house your grandfather built, is that it's too easy to notice how insignificant you are.""It wasn't in church but in moments like this when I maybe believed in God or something like that. Some order to the chaos, some meaning. That we collide with the people we need, that we meet the ones who will love us, that there's some underlying reason to everything.""........But that's childhood. Before you realize that every step is a choice. That something must be given up for something to be gained. Everything on a scale, a weighing of desires, an ordering of which you want more - and what you'd be willing to give for it.""It happens like this - men losing themselves in moments of passion. We drive them to it. It's not their fault.""There is nothing more dangerous, nothing more powerful, nothing more necessary and essential for survival than the lies we tell ourselves.""If there's a feeling to home, it's this. A place where there are no secrets, where nothing stays buried: not the past and not yourself. Where you can be all the versions of you, see it all reflected back as you walk the same stairs, the same halls, the same rooms.""It's the four walls echoing back everything you've ever been and everything you've ever done, and it's the people who stay despite it all. Through it all. For it all. Where you can stop fearing the truth. Let it be part of you. Take it to bed. Stare it in the face."And then there are the author's quotes by Soren Kierkegaard - one the author provides at the beginning of the novel, the other at the end (which I found to be brilliantly done by the author):"It is quite true what philosophy says; that life must be understood backwards.""It is quite true what philosophy says; that life must be understood backwards. But then one forgets the other principle: that it must be lived forwards."

Megan Miranda is a gifted writer. She deserves all the praise she's getting for this novel, and I hope to see more adult fiction from her. I enjoyed the book a lot. I'm sure she's getting plenty of five star reviews, so I want to offer just one bit of mild criticism. This is a compelling story, with characters that the reader cares about, beautifully drawn. It also runs on a certain "fuel," which is the utter intensity of high school and teen aged years, which anyone honest should be able to remember. It's a time when life seems to have no boundaries, when what boundaries there are seem put there only to be tested, or broken. Therefore it's also a time when life can spin completely out of control, so quickly that you don't see it happen.The story brought all of that back to me. I knew girls like Corinne. I believed the story. What I want to say, gently, is that I don't think the decision to structure the book "in reverse" is well handled here. When you have such a strong story, and then make the choice to play around with structure, you really have to know what you're doing. Here, unfortunately, I felt that the "reverse" chapters came off like a gimic, and took away from the story.The reader, more than once, has to stop and ask, now wait, when is this happening? Being asked to question the narrative can be great, but plain old confusion is not so great. And then, for me, it didn't actually seem to work. The story seems to be unfolding forward, not backwards. The truth may always lie in the past, and mistakes made in the past can relentlessly draw you back to a "place" that you wanted only to leave. That's the theme here. But again, trying to do this through structure may not have been the wisest choice. I might have tried parallel narratives, for instance, the present and the past running concurrently. But I want to say that it was a valiant effort. For a novel that pulls off really dismantling structure, see Kate Atkinson's brilliant "Life After Life." It's never been done better. But Miranda is a very good writer. I hope she keeps trying.

Loved the book opening, struggled with part two but then became completely engaged trying to work out how it was going to end. A good read.

Es lo que me pasa por escuchar a los demás cuando se trata de libros. Ni pude acabarlo, no me gustó para nada. Los personajes de una dimensión y la historia en sí tampoco era muy interesante. Creo que con este tipo de libros o aciertas o fallas, no hay término medio.

bel romanzo ed ottimo allenamento alla lingua

Sehr spannend

Esta escrito de forma original ya que va de adelante hacia atrás y así poco a poco vas entendiendo la trama.