I don't read a lot of thriller-type books, but How We Fall Apart sounded like a high stakes Gossip Girl and caught my interest. It started off strong with our narrator, Nancy, giving a speech in place of Jamie who has gone missing. Then she speech is interrupted when someone replaces a slide with an ominous note...a note that Nancy wrote, but no one knows that! Then Jamie turns up dead and an anonymous person known as The Proctor suggests that Nancy or three other of Jamie's former friends are the murder! Uh oh!
Unfortunately, How We Fall Apart goes down quite fast from there. While I wanted to know everybody's deepest darkest secrets, I honestly didn't care that much, because I didn't know these characters at all. And the secrets weren't that juicy, except Nancy's. There's also all this build up surrounding "the Incident" which is a secret that all four former friends shared with Jamie, but by time that's revealed, I had already mostly checked out.
Even the big showdown at the end with The Proctor was a let down. I still wanted to know who it was just for curiosity's sake, but that was a bust. Like I said, we don't get to know the characters at all, so I wasn't shocked or even intrigued when they revealed themself. It was just like...oh? This character was barely a blip on my radar and they have to give a grand monologue to explain why they did what they did, because of course, we don't know anything about them or their past! Honestly, How We Fall Apart could have been condensed to just that chapter and still made sense.