BOOK REVIEW: Vanishing Girls

This is a book review for Vanishing Girls by Lauren Oliver. I received the ARC for this book from Edelwess in exchange for an honest review.

Dara and Nick used to be inseparable, but that was before the accident that left Dara's beautiful face scarred and the two sisters totally estranged. When Dara vanishes on her birthday, Nick thinks Dara is just playing around. But another girl, nine-year-old Madeline Snow, has vanished, too, and Nick becomes increasingly convinced that the two disappearances are linked. Now Nick has to find her sister, before it's too late. 
In this edgy and compelling novel, Lauren Oliver creates a world of intrigue, loss, and suspicion as two sisters search to find themselves, and each other.

First of all, let me say that I am a huge fan of Lauren Oliver. I first fell in love with her Delirium series and I was also a fan of Before I Fall and Panic. I have loved everything she has done . . . until now. That is not to say that I hated the book, but I didn't love it either. The book did not hook me immediately. The pacing was extremely slow. The premise of the book suggests that a major plot point was that Dara vanishes on her birthday. However, this did not happen until more than halfway through the book. My Kindle does show percentage read and I looked at it when Dara vanished. I had read 53% of the book when it finally happened.

So what was going on up until that point? Not a whole lot. It mainly bounced around between Nick and Dara's POV's, before and after, along with clips of news articles online and excerpts from Dara's journal. Sometimes Oliver wouldn't even specify whether it was an event before or after the accident; she just gave a date. This made it even more confusing. Maybe it was all this switching between time frames and POV's that prevented me from fully connecting with any of the characters. I didn't really care that Nick and Dara were't talking after the accident. And I didn't care that much about Madeline Snow. She was a secondary character and her disappearance didn't seem to effect any of the major characters for a large part of the book. I basically spent the first half of the book waiting for something, anything, to happen.

When Dara finally did disappear, that's when I was hooked. Nick started piecing the facts together about why Dara had been acting so weird since the accident (a mystery I didn't even know existed until Dara's disappearance) and what connection she had to Madeline Snow. The pacing picked up pretty quickly at that point and I was on the edge of my seat. And two words about the big reveal: BLOWN AWAY. I am not kidding when I say that I did NOT see it coming. I will not give away any spoilers, but I will say that a lot of stuff clicked into place for me once I knew what was going on. Even though it was a pretty big reveal, I still couldn't get over the first half of the book. And then immediately after the big reveal, the pacing immediately slowed down a bit and dragged. That is mainly a result of the fact that the author decides to show emails between a few of the characters and news articles instead of personal reactions and emotions by the main characters. Once again, this huge thing happens and I found it hard to care because of a lack of connection to anyone in the book.

I struggled with a rating for this book. I was only mesmerized by the book for about half of it. I decided to give this book a 3/5.