Then You Were Gone

November 15, 2012
A girl becomes obsessed with her former best friend's disappearance. Almost every teenage girl experiences the particular brand of heartbreak caused by a special friend's desertion. But this story comes with a twist: Two years after the magnetic and mercurial Dakota drops Adrienne, the story's distressed narrator and protagonist, she leaves a message on Adrienne's cellphone and then disappears. Is it suicide, as a note seems to indicate, a voluntary act or something more sinister? Adrienne, who when readers first meet her seems fairly normal, is initially shaken by the alpha girl's disappearance, a feeling that is complicated by the guilt of having not immediately responded to her ex-friend's call. Together with the similarly fixated-on-Dakota Julian, Dakota's band mate and sometime boyfriend, Adrienne begins to look into the mystery, an exercise that affects her relationship with devoted boyfriend Lee and worries new best friend Kate. The action, which becomes repetitious, moves in spurts and starts, and while the protagonist's emotional journey from stasis to obsession to freedom rings true, readers may find it hard to connect with the one-note heroine. A plot twist near the three-quarter mark gooses the story, which then picks up speed and glides smoothly to a satisfying finish, though a blackmail scene may leave readers feeling ambivalent. This believable portrait of teenage obsession is hampered by a dull protagonist. (Fiction. 14 & up)

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January 1, 2013

Gr 10 Up-Inseparable friends since childhood, Dakota and Adrienne barely acknowledge each other in high school. Then one day, after two years of not speaking, Adrienne gets a desperate phone call from Dakota. She doesn't answer, and then Dakota disappears. Their Los Angeles neighborhood is rocked by her suspected suicide. Although Adrienne has a loving family, doting boyfriend, and caring BFF, she becomes darkly obsessed with Dakota. She starts to act and look like her, including hooking up with her boyfriend. She smokes, skips assignments, and pushes away her loved ones. The story reads quickly, and the ending is more or less positive. However, many readers may feel confused with Adrienne's inexplicable response to Dakota's disappearance, which is somewhat bizarre. Additionally, the author includes plenty of sex, drugs, smoking, alcohol abuse, and coarse language that does not add anything significant to the story line.-Mindy Whipple, West Jordan Library, UT

Copyright 2013 School Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

July 1, 2013
Out of the blue Adrienne receives a cryptic, alarming voicemail from her former friend Dakota--and then Dakota is gone. The guilt and grief start to wear on the life Adrienne has built post-Dakota, and Strasnick writes in tense, staccato prose that feels increasingly frantic as Adrienne investigates the disappearance with Dakota's (hot) ex-boyfriend. Here is a lightning-quick read that's also a suspenseful emotional ride.

(Copyright 2013 by The Horn Book, Incorporated, Boston. All rights reserved.)