It's Not Her Review

works really well here. Courtney is narrating the present, what is happening after the murders, how the investigation is going, how the family is falling apart. And then reese, the teenage niece who was found at the scene, is narrating the week before and everything that led up to that night. I liked that kubica gave us two very different voices and two very different ways of experiencing the same events. Courtney is trying to make sense of what happened. Reese is living through the thing that is going to become what courtney is trying to make sense of. That gap between them creates a tension that is always present even in the quieter chapters.

The character of reese is where i think the book is strongest. She is seventeen and lonely and going through the exact kind of social pain that being seventeen involves and then she meets this guy daniel at the resort who actually pays attention to her. And you as the reader can see so clearly that daniel is not a good situation but you also completely understand why reese cannot see that. Kubica does not write her as stupid or naive. She writes her as a real teenager who is dealing with real loneliness and making a decision that makes sense from inside her own head even if it looks different from the outside. That felt true to me and it made me care about reese in a way i was not expecting.

The twist in the final third is the kind that made me actually stop and put the book down for a second. I had a theory going for most of the book and i was feeling pretty good about it and then kubica just quietly pulled the whole thing out from under me in a way i did not see coming at all. And the thing i liked about it is that it is not a cheap twist. When you think back through everything that came before it all fits. She was not hiding things from you dishonestly. She was just making you look in a different direction and i fell for it completely.

My only small issue is that the middle section is a slow burn in a way that some readers might find a bit too patient. There are stretches where the tension dips a little and the pacing softens before picking back up. It never stopped me from reading but i noticed it. Also a few of the adult supporting characters in the resort are not developed enough for me to fully keep track of them. But these are small things in a book that overall delivers exactly what a good thriller is supposed to.