Book Review: Frayed by Kara Terzis

Title: Frayed

Author: Kara Terzis

Publisher: Sourcebooks Fire

Release Date: June 7, 2016

Format Read: ARC

Rating: 2 stars

Description from Goodreads:

Dear Kesley,

My therapist tells me I should write you a letter. Like flushing all my thoughts and feelings out of my system onto paper. I tell her it's a stupid idea.

But here I am, writing a letter to a dead girl. Where do I start? Where did our story begin? From the moment you were born... or died?

I'll start with the moment I found out the truth about you. Your lies and my pain. Because it always begins and ends with you.

And that end began when Rafe Lawrence came back to town...

Ava Hale will do anything to find her sister's killer... although she'll wish she hadn't. Because the harder Ava looks, the more secrets she uncovers about Kesley, and the more she begins to think that the girl she called sister was a liar. A sneak. A stranger.

And Kesley's murderer could be much closer than she thought...

A debut novel from Wattpad award-winner Kara Terzis, FRAYED is a psychological whodunnit that will keep you guessing!

Recently, I've been loving YA mysteries and thrillers. So of course I jumped at the chance to get ahold of FRAYED by Kara Terzis. I was pretty excited about it, and was hoping for another fantastic one to add to my shelves, but here I am giving it a two star review.

And the thing about it is that I can't even tell you why I didn't like it, because I'd be telling you who killed Kesley. So... I guess I can tell you that, while the ending did catch me completely off-guard and cause me a good bit of shock, it felt wrong. To me, it feels very much like a pre-existing novel that I've read, that I can't name because then you'll be spoiled for the entire book. Once I learned who the killer was, everything fit and made sense, but it was almost like it was too much. 

Throughout the entire story I was going back and forth between killers, picking out who had motive, opportunity, and capability, and while I love that it wasn't someone I guessed, the ending feels kind of copy/pasted to me, in a sense that it felt like it was used just to add more darkness to an already (maybe even unnecessarily) dark story. And I LOVE dark books. But this one was a little over-the-top, in my opinion.

A little too dark, and a little too immature, maybe, for YA in terms of how things ended and were stitched together. 

I was not a fan of this book, which pains me, because the premise was SO promising. It earns a two star review from me. If you don't mind spoilers, feel free to contact me and I'll give you some more information as to why I disliked it so much.

(Un)Happily,

Stephanie