As Mara and Noah are hiking through the swamp, they end up having to cross an alligator-infested creek. So naturally they end up surrounded by a fuckton of alligators that are all just rarin’ to chomp on some tasty humans. Because of course. They “pop up out of nowhere” and then swim/run closer to the thrashing teenagers, attracted by all that swimming.

So many problems, and after only a few minutes on google:

• Alligators don’t eat humans. Their preferred prey is much, much smaller than humans and they typically won’t go after something our size unless their usual prey is scarce or they feel threatened. But hey, maybe there’s a nest nearby.
• Alligators are ambush hunters. They don’t sneak up on ya, they wait and snap. Why the hell would they pop up and then just sit there staring?
• Alligators won’t chase you very far. They’re quick buggers, but also, they’re ambush hunters. If they can’t kill something fast, they sit down again, and they certainly aren’t going to chase someone as a first course of action.
• Seriously, book, you can’t just replace any old animal you want with “wolf pack,” because what I’m basically getting from this section is “that scene all fantasies have of wolves chasing someone in the woods, but with alligators.”

Mara thinks mean thoughts and that makes the alligators go away (magic?), so they escape. Noah seems to know that she did something, but he won’t explain.

They run through the woods and find a clearing with a couple of buildings. They decide to break into the nearest (and smaller) one first to look for Joseph. At no point in any of this does Mara ask for more information from Noah, like “what is this place?” or “do you think there’s other people here?” or “is it possible there might be armed guards around?”

Then again, she can’t be arsed to even ask how he knows Joseph is here. *sigh*

They find Joseph inside, unconscious and bound. Just as they’re carrying him out of the building, a car shows up.

…so they just run and make it back to Noah’s car a couple paragraphs later with no problems. Wow. Thrilling.

Naturally, there was a chapter break between the car showing up and them running off. The chapter breaks always have some sort of “cliffhanger” line at the end, but there’s no tension anymore, because you can pretty much guarantee that whatever comes next will be a letdown. There’s never any additional buildup. The start of every chapter is just the ‘problem’ from the last line either being ignored or quickly solved. This is bad enough when it shows up in TV series every week, but these chapters are just a few pages long! That’s a hell of a lot of tension to be killing.

They get in the car and speed off with absolutely no sign of pursuit, because of course. Mara wrenched her shoulder out of socket during the break-in, but refuses to go to a hospital because of her phobia, so Noah puts in back in place for her.

That’s the second time in two chapters that a problem has come up to just be fixed again and present absolutely no impediment whatsoever. I mean, there are so many options for drama here. Noah could set it wrong and cause more damage, forcing them to an ER anyway. That would give some consequence to Mara’s phobia and cause all sorts of mess! But, no, screw that, the book isn’t interested in cause and effect.

Mara passes out from pain in her shoulder and wakes up when they are almost home. Joseph is awake, too, and Noah told a lie about finding him at school after he hit his head. (Also, apparently Joseph didn’t text Noah, that was another lie. So many lies.) Except, if Joseph really was unconscious for going on 12 hours now, he really needs to go to an ER. And he shouldn’t be this lucid.

But, no, everyone just rolls right along like nothing is wrong, not even the kid who was just told he spent half a day passed out in a ditch.

And if he was unconscious for some other reason, like being drugged, he still shouldn’t be firing on all pistons right now.

Guys, come on, being unconscious is a bad thing and has consequences.

Mara asks her brother to keep the whole thing hush hush, telling him that their mom will freak out if she finds out that her baby boy was left injured and abandoned for half a day.

And…why is this a bad thing? I mean, ignore the part where this is a lie, the school still allowed this child to be kidnapped from their grounds, someone needs to raise a stink about that. Stink-raising is not always a bad thing.

Mara also decides not to tell Joseph the truth of what happened. Partly because…it’ll make her look crazy? IDK, that reasoning is pretty thin, but also because

I could think of few things more traumatic than being kidnapped, and I knew from experience just how hard it would be to come back from something like that. If he even could.

Uh, he was kidnapped. If you don’t tell him he was kidnapped, he was still kidnapped. The experience is still there. Shit is going to happen. Either he’s brain is scrambled from whatever kept him knocked out for 12 hours, or has repressed memories of the event, or both. Violence has happened to this little boy, and that does not get swept under the rug just because you refuse to talk about it.

However, you are preventing him from being able to deal with it by ensuring that he doesn’t have all the necessary information to seek help.

This is fucked up on so many levels, most of them starting with the fact that the book thinks you can be knocked the fuck out for twelve fucking hours with no consequences. I can’t even untangle all of the other problems with this whole situation because that bit of reality-bending nonsense is screwing up everything else.

So I’ll just end the whole rant with this: wow, what a fucking major waste of a side plot to have the whole mess end in fucking nothing actually happening. Her brother was fucking kidnapped and we return to square one. I swear, it’s like an entire season of sitcom episodes condensed into one novel, where we have to keep resetting to the status quo, except at least sitcoms will actually resolve the storyline before hitting the reset button.

Mara decides to not go to bed because it’s practically morning already, and instead gets cleaned up and flips through the tv channels. The news comes on and reports on the mysterious appearance of a massive number of dead alligators in Everglades City.

“Biologists called out to the scene are saying it’s most likely due to oxygen depletion in the water. A startling number of alligator corpses are thought to be the culprit.” […] “An abundance of decomposing matter in the water soaks up a large amount of oxygen, killing off fish in the area in a matter of hours.

…? Really? I mean, I’m no scientist and google keeps wanting to give me answers on ‘complete’ decomposition, so maybe, but it still seems far fetched? Also, how did the news channel find out about it so fast? Even if all those bodies did kill the fish “in a matter of hours,” that should mean that it is just now killing the fish, which means that someone shouldn’t even notice it until a couple of hours still, which means the news shouldn’t be reporting on this until the evening.

Oh, right, dun dun dun whatever.