A decent potboiler, genre: midwestern gothic, to while away a lazy summer day. Unfortunately, for a book that deals with repeated sexual abuse, it’s surprisingly unsympathetic to the victim, with the female narrator having a slight Humbert Humbert-esque rationale of the situation. So that was uncomfortable. Obviously, no one in the story (except maybe the narrator’s high school flame Cooper) is that sympathetic, but at the same time, none of the characters really have enough depth to make their unsympathetic personalities compelling. Of course, it’s not a literary novel; it’s a (slightly trashy, although not in a bad way) mystery novel where Engel trusts her writing and her readers enough not to make the sexual abuse the lurid, end revelation. Out of everything in the book, I appreciated that the most.
The Roanoke Girls by Amy Engel went on sale March 7, 2017.
I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.