Vanishing Girls by Lauren Oliver (a book with a love triangle)

In all technicality this book doesn't have a love triangle; people that have read this book will understand what I'm talking about but originally it started out with two sisters liking the same boy. It is getting harder now to just read whatever I want and fit it into a category, so soon I will have to start reading more specific books. But for now I can work to fit this book into the love triangle category.

I didn't really like this book at all. I hated the "twist"; even though I didn't see it coming, it wasn't very original and it seemed like a bit of a stretch for the book. I didn't like how the book was marketed because the synopsis really didn't fit the story. It was a really slow book but I kept reading because I wanted to see what happened at the end but that only disappointed me too. Dara doesn't even disappear until  3/4 of the way through the book. I was expecting the whole thing to be about the missing girls but it wasn't. I also found the characters to be really annoying. Nick seemed to get on my nerves more because she blamed everything that happened to her on her sister even thought her sister was the one that was hurt in the accident. Dara complained a lot too and I just couldn't relate to either one of them.

MEGA SPOILERS TO FOLLOW....

If you read the book and you read the top part and were confused by how I talked about the sisters, I understand. After finding out that they were both Nick the whole time, I struggled to try and think of them as two separate people. After finding our about Nick's personality disorder, I hated to think about how her family and friends had overlooked this for so long. I know that she  was seeing a therapist but her family let her continue to think that her sister was alive. Even Parker enabled her through his relationship with "Dara". When they were kissing in the car and her called her by her real name, he didn't seem surprised when she freaked out and he even tried to defend himself. They all overlooked it while she continued to pretend to be two separate people. They let it get to the point when she could have harmed herself during her breakdown. 

I also didn't like the Madeline Snow story. The synopsis made it seem like Dara and Madeline were related in some way but that wasn't true. Really Madeline wasn't even kidnapped, she just got scared and ran off for ten days! I can't believe that a child could hide for that long and the police wouldn't find her. Also, Madeline's sister's cover story wasn't very convincing. She made up this whole story about being at the ice-cream shop when Madeline was taken, when really she was wasted at a club! When I found that out, I didn't understand how the police wouldn't immediately figure out that was a lie. If she had really been at Big Scoop people would have seen her, she would have been on video, and the police would have verified all of that. Even the neighbor didn't tell the police she was lying until Madeline had been missing for about a week. Overall, i pretty much hated it and was beyond disappointed because I had been so excited to read a YA thriller.

MY RATING: *