Ryan can’t seem to get her memories in order. When she breaks it off with her long-term boyfriend, Corey, she can’t help but feel free. But mysterious events keep Ryan asking “just what happened?” After her family moved to Ryton, after Carter goes missing, after Jacob is in the hospital. All of these afters, but Ryan can’t remember the befores. With Harper and Elliot by her side, Ryan can only … hope that she does not forget… again. Will Ryan be able to recover her memory to figure out what happened when it all went dark?
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Not Like Everyone Else is a suspenseful young adult novel by Jennifer Leigh published in 2018. It is the first novel I’ve read by the author, but she has a few others and is a very prolific blogger on her website @ Bound to Writing. I’d been following her blog for about a year and finally purchased a copy of the book earlier this month. I wanted something on the shorter side but with a thriller feel to it, and it has well-served that purpose.
Ryan has left her abusive boyfriend, Corey, about a year after living together and graduating from high school. She has wavering self-confidence, lost some friends, and shares a typical love/hate relationship with her parents. While they support her, they’re also very pushy in her opinion. As she navigates the dating world and takes on a new job, she re-connects with a former frenemy from high school who now wants to be friends. We see Ryan’s life meander for a few weeks where she begins to show us there are some peculiar things going on around her. Either she’s leaving information out from her story, someone is stalking her, or there’s a middle ground where several interference factors are playing out.
After a boy she went on a date with goes missing, everything begins to fall apart. Ryan is either a killer, the next to be killed, or has information she doesn’t realize she has. Although the novel is mostly told from Ryan’s POV, we are treated to several chapters from the killer’s POV – and we don’t know who it is. We do know (s)he has a passion for torturing victims for specific reasons, but it takes about 90% of the book before we learn the truth. One of the best aspects of this novel which definitely added to the suspense is how the story is told in present tense. We are stepping through the entire plot / action (except for a few memories) as they happen to Ryan and some of her friends. It is here I found myself intrigued by the plot because the cast isn’t very large. There are 4 or 5 supporting characters plus a handful of seemingly innocuous background players. The author is smart, so the killer has to be someone we know. It’s not gonna be some random crazy shocker that makes no sense. And in the end, it does time together well with a believable and scary conclusion.
I played artful detective trying to guess. I enjoyed the twists and turns and the inability to decide who to trust among the characters, including the narrator herself. When it finally comes together, there’s an explosive chase scene and emotional turbulence. A lot of the novel is a psychological thriller with some added physical intensity. Leigh’s writing style is straightforward and clean based more on the action rather than grandiose descriptions. It works in a suspense novel. It was a quick read and I wanted to keep turning the pages to figure it all out.
I will read more from her book list in the next year and look forward to seeing her style and characterization develop to keep drawing us in further. Kudos to the author for keeping me entertained last night.