Reviews

We Were Never Here by Andrea Bartz

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kastnc's review

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3.0

Meh, I don’t know.. it was fine

kristen_eden's review

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3.0

Interesting plot, annoying one-sided characters, and a somewhat easy ending. Meh.

kerasalwaysreading's review against another edition

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3.0

This was a good book. I feel a bit of a disconnect though, because while this book had all the makings of greatness, I found it just okay. I can see why it is loved by many but it slightly missed that mark for me.

Emily and Kristen are best friends who love to travel together, having adventures. But when an encounter with a stranger turns deadly (and not for the first time), Emily is having trouble getting back to normal. Kristen seems like she is okay though and Emily can’t understand her cavalier attitude to what they did.

Emily annoyed me and Kristen freaked me out. I didn’t enjoy how naive Emily was through most of this book. It was one of those glaringly obvious situations that seem so unrealistic - like why hadn’t Emily caught on sooner…

As I said, this had all the makings of a great read but the execution was disjointed. Good but not great.

joyyboyy's review

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4.0

4.5 - everything I needed out of a book right now. Drama! Suspense! Friend? Foe? Love? All of it. Loved the twists!

jdye6529's review

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3.0

This book was tough to get through. While the over all premise was intriguing enough to keep me reading, the book was pretty clearly going in one distinct direction from a very early point. Too late it tried to misdirect the reader, having already firmly established the eventual outcome. The most intriguing part of the story was the bizarre last paragraph that didn’t quite fit into what you know and have learned about the characters. Maybe the author tried to muddy the water from the books resolution with this last paragraph but all it did was annoy me.

Emily, the narrating character was so unlikeable because she was spineless and seemed to be so awfully naive.
Kristen, the best friend, was as unlikeable as I assume the author intended. Her character had no development because from a very early point in the book you knew exactly what kind of person she was and it never changed.

The author decided to give background information about some side characters as they related to main characters, very late into the book and it seemed forced. The details contradicted the whole point of what had been written up until then and were easily disregarded as nonsense and an attempt at a solid “twist” but it had zero effect on anything so it was just annoying to read.

Overall I stuck it through until the end because I liked the idea of what the book could have been. There were moments of well crafted story, but it sort of seemed as if the author didn’t know how to tie those moments together and opted for ongoing filler instead.