Hello friends, happy Friday, I hope you’ve all had a good week! Today I’m posting my review of Megan Miranda’s novel, Fragments of the Lost.

Fragments of the Lost by: Megan Miranda: When Jessa’s ex-boyfriend, Caleb, is pronounced dead, she’s left to pick up the fragments of his life, literally. Every day she spends time going through his things, packing up his room, but the more she goes through his things, the more things don’t add up. Soon, she starts to wonder if he’s even really dead. This novel was fast-paced and left the reader on the edge of their toes every once in a while. For the most part, the reader felt really confused over the fact that a teenage girl was going through and cleaning up her dead teenage boy’s bedroom, like what kind of mother would ask this of her? It does end up playing out, but the reader just couldn’t get behind that plot and that left this feeling really unbelievable. When we learn more about the mother, things fall into place better, but this reader still didn’t like it. The twists and turns didn’t feel truly shocking; they were definitely entertaining and kept the reader guessing and reading, but it didn’t impress them or wow them in any way. There were certainly enough twists that kept turning up, but they happened more towards the end of the novel; this novel predominately took place within finding all the clues, and living in flashbacks. It wasn’t until part three, which happened a third of the way in, that the puzzle pieces started falling into place and the twists started to really happen, and that felt a little late in the game. As for the characters, they were developed well, for the most part. There was something about our main character, Jessa, that the reader couldn’t get behind. She felt so wooden and one dimensional. Sure, she had hobbies and traits, but they seemed so superficial; even our villain character felt flat, like we never got to grasp her as a character to understand her motives behind why she did what she did. The reader wished we’d gotten more from her, but because this was told in Jessa’s point of view the entire time, we were never going to get that extra background. Even if we’d gotten a point of view from her ex-boyfriend, Caleb, that could have given some great insight, but that didn’t happen. Caleb as a character also felt like we never got to know him either because he’s basically a ghost the entire novel, we only get him through flashbacks and trinkets, so he always felt so mysterious. Again, with this being only in Jessa’s point of view, we only got how she saw him and it was like she didn’t know him at all either, and that’s how the reader felt. In the end though, this was still a compelling thriller, full of twists that made you think.