Alright, we’re down to our last day of this book. There’s four chapters left, but with this book’s tiny chapter length, that’s practically nothing. As is often the case with books on this site, I have to go into the last installment thinking “so what, exactly, is the climax here?” Because I can’t think of what it’s supposed to be. We haven’t particularly been building up to anything. There’s been a lot of stuff going on, but none of it has any goal, nor is there any sort of pressing time limit, nor is anything seemed to be approaching a conclusion. Mara’s found out she has powers, but besides some vague notion of testing them, nothing’s going on there. Joseph was kidnapped and her dad is in that murder trial, but Mara’s been doing her damnest to ignore both those facts for quite a while now. There’s some relationship drama from last chapter, but then they started making out again a page later. So…??? So, yeah, nothing about what we’re going into here feels like it’s actually the end of a novel. Even all this stuff about her powers feels like it should be in the middle of the novel, or at the very least about ¾ths through, not this late.

We open with more making out. Erm, wait, or not.

We’d come so close to kissing a thousand times before, but something almost always stopped us—myself, Noah, the universe.

…wow, this book gets so utterly verbose about them rubbing faces together and hovering millimeters apart that I completely missed the fact that they were not, in fact, playing tonsil hockey. I actually had to backtrack and make sure of this because I couldn’t believe that all that endless gushing about breath and heat and stubble didn’t amount to anything. Kind of sad, really.

Mara realizes that the only time they actually kissed is when she was sure he’d almost died. (Um, I think there was that one time at school, too, though? I’m too lazy to check, but I’m almost positive that he kissed her by her locker and it took like four pages and was very brief, but still. I remember, because I didn’t skim that one and thought it was a lot of buildup for a piffle of a payoff.) Anyway, Mara now doesn’t want to mack because she doesn’t want Noah to die, but Noah misinterprets her comments and just assures her that they can go slow until she feels comfortable.

For some reason this makes her want to tear all his clothes off.

I mean, I get the whole “I can wait” = “Well I don’t want to wait anymore” thing, and unfortunately a lot of guys do too and use that to their advantage. But I mean, in this specific situation, where her problem is she thinks smooches will murder him, I don’t understand how that still works? Granted, she wants to jump his bones without kissing, but does she assume that it’s, specifically, lip contact that will do him in but mashing private parts will work fine? Seems like kind of a dangerous assumption to go on.

Noah puts the kibash on that and repeats the whole “I want to wait until you’re ready” part. The odd thing about all of this is that they’re still framing this as a matter of hesitation, even though Noah now knows she’s worried about accidental murder. It really is utterly astounding how little impact the whole “I can kill people with my brain” has on their concerns. They just sort of accept all of it, but still don’t deviate from the (fairly standard) relationship script. When you add in murder but don’t let it color your character’s priorities, things get creepy super fast.

Also, those two not having sex was a whole chapter, spent at a time when the book doesn’t really have any chapters to spare.

I COULDN’T GO TO SCHOOL THE NEXT DAY, EITHER— that much was obvious. Who knew what triggered the deaths—was a stray thought enough? Or did I have to envision it? And what about the animals that died, even thought I never explicitly wanted them to? What about Rachel?

She’s wondered this a couple of times, how she could kill Rachel without being mad at her. And yet at no point does she consider that, well, when you bring an old building down on your asshole boyfriend, you don’t really have to intend for everyone else to die before they get squished, too. Rachel and Claire could have been murdered in an entirely indirect way.

Noah shows up at lunch time all aflutter because he saw some photos of the girl that died in that murder trial we’ve not been hearing about.

My eyes roamed the pictures, disturbing though they were. Two of them showed Jordana Palmer’s dismembered body lying piecemeal in the tall grass, with chunks of flesh ripped from her calves, her arms, her torso.

These pictures are in a newspaper, mind you. A fucking newspaper. Have I been reading the wrong newspapers? Because I have never, not once in my entire left, encountered a report of a murder where they show graphic pictures of the dismembered corpse. The closest thing I’ve ever seen to a dead body on any news outlet ever is when bodies are covered up and in the background of a larger scene.

Another photo has a picture of the shed Joseph was kidnapped in, and I don’t understand why story couldn’t have just run that photo and left out the dismembered corpse photo and the book could run merrily right along.

They consider the idea that her father’s client and accused murderer (Lassiter) is the guy that kidnapped Joseph. One of Noah’s visions was of a guy going through documents, and that guy had a watch just like one Lassiter is wearing in a news photo. But they have no idea why Lassiter would kidnap his own lawyer’s kid.

See, now, all of this is perfectly fine as a story, but their frantic rushing off to the courthouse to…I don’t know what just highlights how stupid it was to cover up/ignore that whole incident in the first place. Now, they can scream about kidnapping in until they are blue in the face and everyone is just going to look at them like they’re lying, because “what kidnapping?”

They want to rush to the courthouse and tell Mara’s father so he can get the trial extended, even though the jury is already in deliberation. They have to hurry before the jury is done and it’s too late. Again I ask: What kidnapping? Because that is going to be the reaction of everyone down there if all you’ve got is your word.

See, if you hadn’t studiously ignored the entire incident when it actually happened, then we could have a plot about all of this.

“Then what?” I asked, my voice hollow.

“Then we’ll give statements about Joseph’s kidnapping, and Lassiter will be indicted for it.”

NO BECAUSE *sigh* oh, let’s just get this over with.

Mara vaguely hints that she’ll just kill Lassiter, and Noah says that wouldn’t actually make her happy.

“Jude deserved it, too, you know.”

I tilted my head at him. “Did he? You say that because he almost hurt me—”

“He did hurt you,” Noah said, suddenly fierce. “Just because it could have been worse doesn’t mean he didn’t hurt you.”

“He didn’t rape me, Noah. He hit me. He kissed me. I killed him for that.”

I am so very torn, because Noah finally said something I actually like, but in the middle of also saying he deserved to die and Mara ignoring his actual good comments.

“No,” he said, as he turned off the highway on to a bustling street. I could see the courthouse in the distance. “There’s a difference. With Jude, you were alone and terrified and your mind reacted without you even knowing it. With him it was self-defense. With Lassiter—it would be an execution.”

Shit, who is this guy, Noah’s never been this understanding before.

They make it to the courthouse only to find that the jury has been out for two hours, so they assume they’re too late.

Except, they also assume that they can just say Joseph got kidnapped and everyone will take that on faith. And that’s a completely different crime. So, while it would suck for him to get acquitted for a murder he committed, it doesn’t actually mean that he can never be charged with any other crime ever.

Mara doesn’t want to wait and see if he actually got acquitted or not, though.

“I’ve been so lost since Rachel died. I’ve tried to do the right things. With Mabel, Morales—I did everything the right way; calling Animal Control, telling the principal. But nothing worked until I did it my way,” I said, and my own words sparked something inside of me. “Because everything that’s happened—it’s been about me from the beginning. Understanding who I am and what I’m supposed to do. This is what I’m supposed to do. It’s what I have to do.”

Um, wow, I think that’s the utter worst moral in a book I’ve seen yet. At least, as far as ones that get spelled out go.

I’m not even sure how to unpack that mess of nonsense because it’s wrong from so many directions. First with saying that everything is about her, then with the fact that she jumps straight from “first attempt at doing right” to “murder,” and landing somewhere around the whole “those murders were what I was supposed to do anyway, okay?”

Mara keeps insisting that she’s meant to murder Lassiter, that she has to use her powers, blah blah blah superhero angst speech #2304. Frankly, I don’t have anything against it besides what’s inherent to the condensed timeline. Yeah, it’s twisted, but most of the book has been about Mara being twisted, confused, and morally grey. It’s cool. But the way all of this is getting shoved in so fast ruins everything. All of her arguments are null and void by the fact that she doesn’t struggle with her powers, she just jumps straight into “well obvs I’m supposed to murder that guy.” All of the tension around ‘can’t do it the legit way’ turns to nonsense when they’ve never tried anything because the plot forgot to…you know, be a plot. This whole conversation is a wonderful idea for something twisted and angsty, but someone forgot to take that idea and actually make it into a story, so it’s just a nugget instead.

They spend more words on Noah trying to talk her out of it because deliberate murder would change her than they spend on any option other than murder.

While they’re still talking, a bunch of people come out of the courthouse, and it’s Lassiter and everyone that was in his trial and a bunch of reporters. The reporters…were already outside? Followed them from inside? I don’t know, it’s all quite unclear.

Mara imagines up a gun and then…sort of blacks out and sees through the eyes of another person, who has a gun and uses it to shoot. When she comes back to herself again, the shooter is pointing at Mara instead, but then she drops the gun. Unlike the weird spontaneously appearing reporters, I like this bit of unclearness. I mean, yeah, I don’t know what’s going on or who had a gun or how much of Mara’s magic was involved, but her magic has always been pretty deliberately vague, so. The police start to arrest Mrs. Palmer (the shooter) and Mara feels pretty pleased with herself.

Except as Mara starts paying attention again, she realizes Lassiter wasn’t shot. Her father was.

Skip to…some amount of time later in a hospital, where a doctor is telling Mrs. Dyer how lucky Mr. Dyer is for not bleeding to death. Apparently Noah got to him and healed enough to keep him alive until they reached the hospital. We find out Lassiter was also shot but probably won’t make it. I guess, for all Noah’s pretty words about doing the right thing, he didn’t heal that guy too.

Mara hangs back away from her family and ruminates on the fact that she’s a danger to everyone around her, but she doesn’t know what to do because if she just runs away her family has the resources to find her pretty quick. So instead she sneaks off and goes to the police station to confess, except she’ll lie about the whole “I did it psychically” part.

I was too young to be sent to prison, but there was a solid chance I’d end up in the juvenile detention center.

…no you’re not.

Before she can do that, though, she sees Jude at the police station. Not hallucination Jude. Actual Jude. Non-dead Jude. Wearing the watch that Noah saw in his vision and thought belonged to Lassiter.

But, psyche, that’s the end of the book. Haha, you’ll have to read the next one to learn anything!

No thanks.

God, what an utter mess of an ending. Everything about it screams “fuck it, I just want to be done.” There’s plenty of good ideas in there, but it’s too disjointed and sudden to actually amount to anything worth reading.

Which is a shame, because again, there’s plenty of good ideas in there. In fact, there’s plenty of good ideas in the whole book. I get why people like it. Mara’s emotional narration is a treat at times, and what it could have been shines through often enough. What it wants to do is obvious, and what it wants to be is pretty cool. If someone in the editing process had kicked out the worst of the clichés and fixed the pacing problems, everything would have been fine. All you really need to get rid of is the weird attitudes everyone but Mara has about mental health and Noah’s horndog status. Seriously, was his being promiscuous ever…anything? He literally never flirted with anyone else, we never have his past dating history be an impact, nothing. All it does is make a bunch of his actions extra creepy with that context. Get rid of his history, and the associated comments about him being an ass, and he’s like 70% better. From there it wouldn’t take much to clean up the rest of his creepy behavior, and that’s half the book’s problems gone right there. Make Mara’s mental conundrum all in her head, and it’s a nice mystery without being downright brain-breaking. Have the murder trial and Joseph’s kidnapping come up earlier, let Mara and Noah actually try to do stuff about it before the last three chapters, take out their useless dating drama to make room, and you’ve got a legit thriller on your hands.

The building blocks of a good book are all in here, they’re just stacked up wrong.