Review Snippets: Part Two

And onward with the reviews....

These Things Hidden by Heather Gudenkauf
This book's description really grabbed me, mostly because I was curious what a golden girl high school student could do that was so bad that her parents disowned her, her own sister will no longer talk to her, and she was just released after spending five years in prison for what she'd done. I'm not going to give too much away other than the book starts with three young twenty-soemthings dealing with the aftermath of one girl's decisions five years earlier.

Gudenkauf does a good job of slowly revealing the truth. But the ending is quite a bombshell and a bit over the top. While this book seemed well-written, it definitely is not an "enjoyable" read just because the subject matter is rather sad. But it's not a bad read either. It's one of those "can't look away from the train wreck" kind of books that makes you want to keep reading to learn what really happened.

Allison thoroughly reviewed The Clouds Beneath the Sun awhile ago. And she rated it very highly. Welllll....maybe I had too high expectations going in. I thought it was about 100 pages too long and Natalie's inner struggle whether to testify or not began to bug me. She seemed to get almost whiny. And the ending just down right made me angry.

As a random sidenote, there's an "author's note" at the end that provides a sort of epilogue to the book. It tells us where certain "characters" ended up. And it confused the hell out of me. Were these real people? That's how the author wrote this note. It seems to suggest the characters were real people. Can anyone shed some light on this for me?

Source disclosure: I receive and e-galley from netgalley.com of These Things Hidden. And I own a copy of The Clouds Beneath the Sun.