I did not find this book to be too engaging. I normally don't like realistic fiction for a lot of these reasons. The one thing I did like about this book was that the parents actively played a role in the protagonists life. In some realistic fiction books, the parents are left out of the story and never brought into the whole plot. And I'm here thinking 'my parents would never let me get away with that'. That made this book very realistic. One of the things I really didn't like about this book is that it was a mystery. Normally I am fine with a good mystery, but this book left a lot of motives unexplained. I don't like that at all. I need to know who the character did that, or at least have some evidence to why a character would do something like that. This book left a lot of things open and unexplained. I was very confused about some of the characters at the end of the book. Overall the book just didn't grab my attention. I was more reading it to read it, not to experience it. Maybe it just wasn't my kind of book, and I confess that someone who likes this kind of stuff would really like this book. but not me. I was very disappointed I had used my reading time to read this book. True that it may help me in the future at some crazy point in time. Otherwise I just didn't like it.