The Opposite of Here by Tara Altebrando
- Pub. Date: June 5 , 2018
- Publisher: Bloomsbury YA
- Pages:256
- Rating:1/5 Stars
- Goodreads/Amazon/ Book Depository
There's no hiding on a cruise ship-not even from yourself.
Natalie's parents are taking her and her three best friends on a cruise for her seventeenth birthday. A sail-a-bration, they call it. But it's only been a few short months since Natalie's boyfriend died in a tragic accident, and she wants to be anywhere but here.
Then she meets a guy on the first night and sparks fly. After a moonlit conversation on a secluded deck of the ship, Natalie pops down to her cabin to get her swimsuit so they can go for a dip. But when she returns, he's gone. Something he said makes her think he might have . . . jumped? No, he couldn't have.
But why do her friends think she's crazy for wanting to make sure he's okay? Also, why do they seem to be hiding something from her? And how can she find him when she doesn't even know his name? Most importantly, why is the captain on the intercom announcing the urgent need for a headcount?
With her signature thrilling storytelling, the author of The Leaving and The Possible explores our vulnerability to the power of suggestion-and the lies we tell others and ourselves-in a twisting, Hitchcock-inspired mystery with high stakes and dark secrets.
Review: The Opposite of Here is my first one star book of the year, but to keep this review fair I'll state I'm not much of a thriller reader and I was in a huge reading slump this year so I haven't read that many books so far.
I'm pretty scared of cruise ships so I thought this would be the perfect read for me and maybe this will have to do with an unreliable character which would have made things much more interesting but that wasn't the case.
The book was just weird and all over the place. All the secondary characters were one dimensional, Natalie's friends, if their names weren't mentioned I would not have been able to tell them apart. Then there was Natalie, so many of her actions rubbed me the wrong way, seeing how this is a thriller I feel if I go in depth about what those actions are might ruin the read for some so one example is treating the people who were there for her like they were nothing while chasing after some random guy she just met on the ship who was playing head games with her.
I ended up marking this book DNF at one point, but decided to pick it up in case the overall grand scheme of things (mystery aspect) would make up for it. It didn't. The reason behind everything was disappointing and this book just left me shaking my head wondering what did I just read and not in a good way.
Overall The Opposite of Here was not for me. If you are mostly a non mystery/thriller reader like me don't even bother this is not the book for us to convert us into reading the genre more but if you live for thrillers then I'd say go take a look at the reviews from people who love thrillers and then make your decision if this is a book for you.
