Let's Get Lost

by Adi Alsaid

[justine_manzano]

I won this book on a twitter giveaway and I'm so happy I did. This is the first book I've read by Adi Alsaid, but it certainly won't be the last. His prose is strong, his descriptions ground you and make you feel, and his characters are interesting. This being a character driven story, characterization was very important, but even when one of the characters was an enigma, you wanted to know why.

The story is split into 5 parts. Each part tells the story of a different teenager. There's Hudson, who works in a garage and is about to go for a career-making college interview. There's Bree, a runaway who has been hitchhiking away from her life, never wanting to look back. There's Elliot, a guy who just told his best friend that he loves her, only to be rejected. There's Sonia, whose is struggling with moving on after the death of her boyfriend. All of their stories start just before they meet Leila, a mysterious girl who is on her way to see the Northern Lights, and whose presence in their story completely changes their lives.

This bothered me at first. Leila seemed like a bit of a Mary Sue, a character who seemed to have a perfect personality, the kind of person everybody liked. In that way, she was a bit of a chameleon. And even though I liked the characters she meets along the way, and was intrigued by the story, Leila bothered me up until I got to the last story, Leila's. When I read that, everything made sense, the story so carefully crafted that moments that flitted by suddenly had meaning.

Four stars for the fact that I questioned Leila's character throughout.