Just another book I wish had more. It just... Ends.

Adrienne wasn't my favorite character in the world, but i can see practically through her eyes. I loved Julian's character, i can see him right in front of my face, and he is still smoking hot. :) Overall it was an OK book, and a pretty fast read.

It was a bit all over the place. It was interesting how people were introduced. Lee seemed like a jerk at first, but then he was a good guy. Murphy seemed like a good guy. The ending came suddenly because there was a preview at the end of the book, so I thought there was more story, but then nope. Publishers should know better.

Adrienne hasn't talked to Dakota in 2 years. That's how long it's been since Dakota walked away from their friendship without so much as a glance back. Sure Adrienne has moved on, she has a new BFF, a boyfriend. But there's always been a part of her that has hung on to Dakota. Dakota has turned into a rockstar. The girl everyone wants to be and nobody really knows.

Then one day Adrienne gets a mysterious voicemail from her old friend... and when Dakota turns up missing, Adrienne feels a crushing guilt for not answering the phone when her ex-friend may have needed her most. A suicide note is found and everyone is acting as if Dakota must be dead... but that is too much for Adrienne to take. Soon she finds herself caught up in an investigation to find out what happened to her ex-bestie. So what really happened to Dakota Webb?? Is she dead? Run away? And can Julian (Dakota's boyfriend) help Adrienne figure it out, or does he know more than he's letting on?

My Thoughts:
This is not my first book by this author. I read Nothing Like You last year and really liked it, so I knew I wanted to try more books by Lauren Strasnick. The thing I love about this author is that her main characters are NOT perfect. Sometimes you literally want to smack the girl. But at the same time they are like real freaking people. Because in real life people don't act the way you want them to. They don't make all the same choices you would've made. Heck who knows what choices you would make unless you're in that moment anyway right?? The other thing about both these books is that the author is not afraid of teen sexuality. And I love that sex is a big issue in this book, but at the same time it's not like preachy or lesson-ey... it's just what these characters do. Right, wrong, whatever.

So in this book you have Adrienne, who I'm not going to lie, got on my nerves a lot. It's like once she found out her friend that she doesn't even talk to anymore is missing, she starts wanting to be her. Honestly I felt sad and embarrassed for her. I wanted to shake her and be like "quit being a god-damned poser, and just be yourself!!!". I felt bad for her friend Kate and especially her boyfriend Lee. Man she was harsh to him!! But I get it. I SO get it. I've been there.... there's this really nice guy and he's being so good to you, and all you can do is shit all over him. Because you can, because he's there, because what you really need isn't some guy catering to you. It doesn't make sense, but I so know what this is like.

What I love about this author's writing is I swear she's the queen of short, amazing chapters. I've never read books with so many 1 or 2 page chapters and felt like they were the perfect length. This author doesn't waste scenes. The characters are somewhere, the point is made... and then 2 pages later they are somewhere completely different on a different day. It just works. And it adds to the over addictiveness of her books.

This is not going to be a book that everyone will like. I think you have to identify with or relate to something going on in the book to be able to like it. For me I totally know what it's like to be in a friendship where one person is dominant over the other one. I had a friend like that once. She was rich and cool and had more experience with guys than I did. She got mad easily, and I became a weaker person because I didn't want her to get mad and leave me. It sounds dumb... but we had a lot of fun together and I didn't want to lose that even though the friendship probably wasn't the healthiest. And that's sort of how Adrienne and Dakota were, so I was feeling it.

I could have lived without Adrienne leaving all her sentences off in the middle though. For instance here is a typical dialogue for Adrienne: "I told you I-" "I should...." "I just- I think-"

The ending... well I don't want to give anything away, but it was just meh for me. I wanted a bigger thing and I didn't really understand what all went down.

OVERALL: YES to more Lauren Strasnick!! Her books aren't for everybody, but they're for me. This book is about mystery and friendship- good and bad.

My Blog:

I received an ARC of this as part of a giveaway. I really enjoyed most of the book--I was a lot more interested in Adrienne than in Dakota, which I think worked well because that is really what the book is about--but the characters don't all seem fully drawn or developed. I read another review of this saying this is more of a novella than a novel, and I agree.

I really enjoyed all of the character relationships, and I think that while not all characters are developed fully, they are presented in a smart way (I really like Sam). I think this is a lot did to Strasnick's writing style, which wouldn't work for all stories but seemed to work really well for this one.

(spoilers ahead)
There was one thing that really rubbed me the wrong way. At the end of the novel, Adrienne tries to make sure that Julian is no longer involved with Dakota. When she asks him, he says that he and Dakota are done, and then says, "I mean, the whole screwing-my-lit-teacher thing...?" and Adrienne laughs with "psychotic relief".

This just seems completely problematic to me. Yeah, I can see why Julian's annoyed Dakota was involved with another man, but that other man was her teacher who was an adult male and she was a minor who could not legally provide consent. That's statutory rape. Add on the fact that Dakota describes him as someone who "likes little girls" and all ambiguity of the teacher as a sexual predator vanishes. Dakota's involvement with an adult teacher who should have said no and who should not have forced her into saying yes is not a reason for Julian to turn her away. Her poor behavior toward him, her neglect of him, her manipulation of him--all valid reasons. But being the victim of sexual assault? That's not a fair judgment to pass.

Adrienne and Dakota stopped being friends two years ago, but it's Adrienne who receives a mysterious call for help from Dakota before she goes missing. Before she's presumed dead. Before she's presumed dead because she killed herself. There's no body found, but Dakota's reckless rockstar lifestyle is all the clue anyone needs to draw that conclusion.

It's then Adrienne sinks into deep grief over the loss. Is it her fault since she didn't answer the voice mail for days? Why does she miss Dakota so much when they hadn't even been friends? The further she sinks, the more she moves away from best friend Kate and devoted boyfriend Lee. She finds herself instead drawn to Julian -- the last guy Dakota was with -- and together, Julian and Adrienne are all the wrong things to one another.

Strasnick's book is an excellent exploration of the lines between grief and intimacy. The sharp, fast-paced writing keeps the mystery of Dakota's disappearance propelling forward, but she offers equally sharp sensual scenes between Adrienne and Lee to slow the momentum down to where it needs to be in order to offer up real insight into who these characters are. Because the thing is, none of the characters in this book are exactly who they appear to be. Adrienne may not be a saint, and Dakota, for all she seems to be, may be but a hollow shell of that.

Spoiler

The intimacy moments in this book were really interesting -- while at the beginning, Adrienne is fully invested in her relationship with Lee, it falls away as she sinks into grief. As she sinks into trying to fully understand Dakota and her motivations. Since their friendship had ended, she hadn't thought of Dakota much, other than what she'd seen of Dakota and heard of her. So when Adrienne begins wanting to live like Dakota to understand her, to the point of wearing her clothes and acting her part, she and Lee's relationship crumbles. Because Lee wants ADRIENNE and not Dakota. In reclaiming Dakota, Adrienne goes as far as to seek Dakota's former boyfriend Julian and he, being in deep grief himself, wants this secondhand version of Dakota. But it's that moment, when they're about to be intimate, that Adrienne wakes up and realizes how terrible she's being to everyone. How grief has literally consumed her. When the walls come down and she is at that moment of being fully nude (in all senses of the word) with another person who doesn't actually love her as Adrienne, that's the wakeup call she needed. And yet! When she DOES have this wakeup call, she realizes that she DOES like Julian. As they're able to piece together who they are as individuals without Dakota, they can reclaim something else for themselves. For THEIR relationship to and with one another. This all ties nicely back to Dakota's return and confessions about who she is to herself and who she wanted to be with other people.

Though a small detail, I loved how this featured a blended, non-traditional family, with a live-in boyfriend of Adrienne's mother, Sam. And he's not just there, but he's THERE -- he and Adrienne have a great relationship, and it's through something small he tells her that Adrienne puts together the pieces of what happened to Dakota. Or rather, who happened to Dakota.

My one disappointment with the story came when

Spoiler

the reveal is that Dakota is still alive and she'd gone into hiding because she's become pregnant with her former lit teacher Nick Murphy's baby. While Murphy plays a big role in Adrienne's life -- he's the one teacher she likes and his class is the one she does well in and cares about -- it wasn't ever clear he played a big role in Dakota's. At the end we learn via Dakota that she found her purpose in gaining attention (at the cost of herself and who she is at her core), I needed a little more from Murphy or about Murphy to buy this wholeheartedly. A fair argument could be made that Dakota made up that story to gain attention, but since Adrienne calls out her teacher and he doesn't relent, I don't think that's the case.

This book reminded me a lot of Like Mandarin, and I think readers who liked that book will dig this. But it is also a deep grief book, and there were certain moments that reminded me of a number of contemporary grief-themed titles. Strasnick's style works for me as a reader, with so much left unsaid or understated and yet, there is so much to be teased out of the story and the characters.

Full review here: http://www.stackedbooks.org/2013/01/then-you-were-gone-by-lauren-strasnick.html

I received the book for free through Goodreads First Reads.

A once close friend disappears and Adrienne Knox finds herself reeling at the sudden loss, repeatedly replaying a last voice mail from her friend, Dakota. High school seems less important and as she reflects on and obsesses about the loss of Dakota, Adrienne begins to question who she is and why she does the things she does.

Strasnick captures teen-speak and attitudes well (although the lack of texting makes this story feel a little dated). Despite the short chapters, the pacing drags as Adrienne unravels and I felt disconnected from the protagonist as she cries or later has a panic attack (described in a clinical way that invites no sympathy or empathy). Overall, an okay read.

This was interesting. There really wasn't much to the plot but my curiosity on finding out what happened to Dakota kept me reading. Then it was revealed and it was... anticlimactic. Even the ending was a bit disappointing. I wanted to know more what happened, the aftermath, a couple more chapters, even pages, would've been nice.

Raw, sweet, tender and truthful