I picked this up in Waterstones as an impulse buy back in June. I thought the blurb sounded very interested and I thought that it must be good to warrant a 10th anniversary printing.

Synopsis (as taken from Amazon) is as follows:

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…

Ability to read – It was surprisingly easy to slip into the mind of teenage Lauren and the language was simple to follow. I had no issue with reading.

Characterisation – Though what Lauren goes through is surprisingly hard and difficult, she did not make for a compelling character of a character I could get behind. I found the other main players like Jam, Madison and the two families to have more depth and emotional range and they were characters I could stand behind. To me, Lauren didn’t have many redeeming qualities and her selfishness and tunnel vision were hard to ignore. By the end of the book I didn’t really think Lauren had changed that much or learnt from what had happened. There was no real growth to her character.

Visualisation – This was easy to visualise, the plot is dramatic and fast paced. The book is loaded with emotion and exposes character weaknesses (except Lauren who seems oblivious to everything), and the vision I reacted was both clear and strong.

Uniqueness – The story was alright but I expected more and to be honest I felt the plot was a little hard to believe and didn’t commit to the reasons behind the actions. There wasn’t much explanation to the facts of the story and that made it harder to believe them.

Star Rating – ★★★