Her writing is beautiful, but her books never appeal to me beyond the interesting plots that they sometimes have. I’m not sure I’ll ever be a superfan, or even a fan, of Lauren Oliver. I mean, they really should have figured things out with the wildly obvious clue that was mentioned and then immediately forgotten because Oliver didn’t want her characters to figure it out for another two hundred pages, so she had them deliberately bypass it. I was ultimately going to give this book a 4 out of 5, but when I figured things out a hundred pages before the characters did, and when I realized how much of the book was clues and how much was just Brynn and Mia thinking about how terrible Summer was to them, I knocked its rating down. I liked the inclusion of the Narnia-esque fantasy book and the nod to fanfiction, though I’m not a fan of the “end a book mid-sentence” aspect. The characters are interesting, too, if generic and too teenager-y for me. The plot, which may have been inspired (but I’m just guessing) by the real-life Slender Man murder, is intriguing and a fairly decent suspense novel. Luckily, Broken Things is more like Vanishing Girls. Vanishing Girls was interesting and compelling. Panic was a jumbled mess of unrealistic garbage.

I enjoy her writing a lot, but occasionally her plots leave a lot to be desired. Rating: 3/5 I’ve had a love-hate relationship with Lauren Oliver and her books. Broken Things, by Lauren Oliver, was published in 2018 by HarperCollins.

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