Book: Erased
Reviewed by Tessara
Rating: 2.5/5
Thanks to the author for providing an advance reader copy. All opinions are my own.
This book had a great deal of promise. The premise was interesting: a woman hosts a true crime podcast, supporting grieving families and advocating for justice, as a result of the traumatic disappearance of her older sister when she was still a child; this woman, Maya, receives a package that hints at the existence of a shadowy cult that disappears women from vulnerable backgrounds, and finds evidence that her own sister may have been a victim of this cult, but further investigation reveals that the women were all running from terrible life circumstances and may well have chosen to leave, rather than being abducted and held against their will. The main character has to grapple with the effect her investigation may have on these women, and the very real possibility that her sister made the choice to run away herself.
Unfortunately, the book does not live up to the potential expressed by it’s premise, because it needs dignificant editing. I desperately wanted to know how this book would conclude, but reading it left me so frustrated that I concluded every single chapter considering whether I ought to just DNF it and move on. The characters are all interesting, as are the choices they make when they encounter difficulties. The male lead is serious and badass and mysterious and kind of hot, with explosive secrets to discover about him. Maya’s friend and producer for her podcast is funny and clever and sensible. Even Maya’s missing sister, who we mostly learn about thrid person, had interesting reveals associated with her. But the text is distractingly repetitive and formulaic: sentences and statements “landed harder” or “struck deep” on almost every single page, and the repeated phrasing “Not because [blank]. Because [blank].” was frustratingly constant. Also, the text is riddled with unnecessary sentence fragments; nearly every single sentence is it’s own paragraph—even when those sentences are a) linked by topic, and b) composed of a single word; and any scene containing two or more characters speaking becomes dizzyingly confusing quickly, since there are few signalling phrases to indicate who is speaking, and every single sentence being broken up into different paragraphs means multiple-sentence speeches by one character appear to be spoken by different people—it’s literally impossible to know who is speaking for the majority of these dialogues. I cannot recommend this book to anyone in its current state; it needs significant editing to even be capable of being read.