Monday's Not Coming

by Tiffany D. Jackson

[empressbrooke]

This was a really gripping book that had me okay with a couple nights of difficulty falling asleep (instead of feeling frustrated, I was glad that it gave me some extra time to read). My library has it tagged as a "suspense" and "thriller" but those words don't really have the right connotation for what the story is actually about.

Some of the other reviews complain about the confusing timelines. Usually I'm not bothered by non-linear storytelling, but there was an added wrinkle in this book where the main character is an unreliable narrator, and she doesn't even know it, and the reader doesn't know it, until near the end of the book. So while the chapters are labeled "before" and "after" and "before the before" as a guide, since it isn't clear what the anchoring event is until near the end of the book (I originally thought it meant "before" and "after" Monday disappeared, but Claudia is looking for her missing friend in both the "before" and the "after" so I quickly discarded that theory and had nothing to replace it with), they don't hold a lot of meaning for most of the story. I don't think the plot needed to be told in a linear manner, but it would have been a lot more clear what story was being told if the author hadn't tried to throw in the unreliable narrator on top of the non-linear timeline. Or maybe if she revealed that the narrator was unreliable much earlier on, rather than springing it as a twist near the end.

But despite that complaint, I really liked the main character and the amount of time and care the author took in developing her. I was really invested in finding out what happened to her best friend even though I knew it couldn't be anything good. I also really liked the supports in the main character's life, her family and friends and teachers. I wish that the plot structure had been different, but it wasn't enough of a negative to knock this from a 4-star review down to a 3.