Megan Miranda: The Girl From Widow Hills

Megan Miranda shows that your past will always catch up to you:

Arden Maynor made national news when she was six, she had been washed away in a flash flood while sleepwalking and miraculously was found alive three days later. Arden is of course grateful to be alive, but she was and still not grateful for all the media and pressures that came afterwards. She changed her name to Olivia as soon as she could and shed Arden the best she could. She now has a life where no one knows about her past. But the past always has a way of catching up to you and with the 20th anniversary of Olivia being rescued looming, there is going to be deadly consequences that are all based from her past.

I went into this book not knowing what to expect other than the premise on the back and the fact that Miranda is a popular author that has quite a back list of books. I will admit that I went into this book with some pretty high expectations and sadly they were not met. Overall, I was bored with the book, bored with the plot, characters and things moved too slowly to keep me hooked into the story. Each chapter felt like a slog to get through, even though there were aspects I enjoyed it was just painful getting from one to the other and no real twist or shocking event along the way (at least for me).

I did enjoy Miranda's writing style, especially with the inclusion of additional information from new articles, reports and the like at the end of each chapters, I feel like this really added to the overall story. I did think that the chapters were a bit too long for my taste, but that is just a personal preference. 

I enjoyed that Olivia is an unreliable narrator of the story with her sleepwalking and her inability to remember that night as a child and anything that happened since her sleepwalking returned. Her struggle to come to terms of what may just have happened those nights felt very real.

I think that Miranda did a great job about how we treat victims of crimes or tragic/traumatizing events, even when there are children involved. The expectation from the public is unbearable and unrealistic for them. It like oh you’re safe now, you shouldn’t be bothered by anything that just happened to you and must now live a perfect life. You can really understand why she changed her name to Olivia and kept her past hidden from everyone. She has too much experience of how if she shared her past everything in the relationship, she was in would change.

I think I went into this book with too high of expectations for never having read a book by Miranda. I do have one other book by her on my TBR (All the Missing Girls) and I will pick it up eventually but just not any time soon.

Cheers!!!

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