Review:
Summer is a 16-year-old who's kidnapped by a man who calls himself Clover. Clover renames her "Lily" and tells her that she is now his family, along with three young women who he has named Poppy, Rose, and Violet. The four of them live in the cellar of Clover's home, entirely dependent upon him. Although his behavior is initially relatively predictable, over the next few months of Summer's captivity he becomes more and more unstable.
Meanwhile, Lewis, Summer's boyfriend, and Summer's friends and family are all looking for her, refusing to give up hope that she might still be alive.
This was a quick read, but not really a very good one. Emotionally, it was very one-note. It alternated between views of the present and past, from Clover, Lewis, and Summer's POVs (first person, present tense). Many scenes could easily have been cut - they didn't contribute anything new to the story or characters that previous scenes hadn't already done. Yes, we get it, Lewis and Summer are teenagers but they're absolutely in love and would never stop hoping to be together again. Yes, Clover has Mommy issues and separates women into two categories, "whore" and "pure."
There was a lot of violence - shortly after Summer was added to Clover's "family," she witnessed him stab a woman to death. And while I'm not generally someone who clamors for more gore, after the third or fourth time Clover simply stabbed someone in the stomach and they instantly died, I started wishing Preston would either make the deaths off-page or start doing something different with them. The rape, thankfully, was off-page.
While I could understand why Summer thought and acted the way she did, it still annoyed me. Immediately after ending up in the cellar, she put herself in a mental group separate from Rose and Poppy, who she repeatedly described as acting like they didn't want to leave. This lasted for months, even after a new person was added to the "family," tried to enlist Summer's help to escape, and Summer did nothing right along with Poppy and Rose when the new girl made her attempt. It never seemed to occur to her that it wasn't that Rose and Poppy didn't want to leave (although Rose's three years in the cellar definitely messed her up) but that they couldn't see any other way to survive. Eventually, I saw Summer's "I'm different from those girls who don't really want to leave" attitude as a way of reassuring herself that she wasn't breaking, but it was still frustrating to see those thoughts repeated over and over.
The ending felt unfinished. Several characters' stories were wrapped up off-page. It felt weirdly unreal, like the author was going to jump out with a last second twist. Really, though, there were no twists here, and very little that even qualified as a surprise.
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