Review: Chloe Cates is Missing by Mandy McHugh

 

Chloe Cates is Missing by Mandy McHugh
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

AThe disappearance of a young internet celebrity ignites a firestorm of speculation on social media, and to find her a detective will have to extinguish the blaze. 

Chloe Cates is missing. The 13-year-old star of the hit YouTube series, “CC and Me,” has disappeared, and nobody knows where she’s gone — least of all ruthless momager Jennifer Scarborough, who has spent much of her daughter’s young life crafting a child celebrity persona that is finally beginning to pay off. And in Chloe’s absence, the faux-fairytale world that supported that persona begins to fracture, revealing secrets capable of reducing the highly-dysfunctional Scarborough family to rubble. 

Anxious to find her daughter and preserve the life she’s worked so hard to build, Jennifer turns to social media for help, but the hearsay, false claims, and salacious suspicions only multiply. As the search becomes as sensational as Chloe’s series, Missing Persons detective Emilina Stone steps in, only to realize she has a connection to this case herself. Will she be able to stay objective and cut through the rumors to find the truth before it’s too late?

Told from multiple points of view including Jennifer, Emilina, and pages from Chloe’s lost diary, Chloe Cates Is Missing is a suspenseful novel of a child pushed to the brink, and of the troubled family that desperately needs her back.

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Chloe Cates is missing is a phenomenal debut. Seriously. It’s SO good.

I started it late evening yesterday and read until the early hours, and then picked it up again as soon as I could today. Within twenty-four hours of starting this book, I’d finished it. I simply couldn’t read it fast enough. Chloe Cates is Missing is a twisty, complicated story that spirals around Jennifer, the mother of Abigail who is more publicly known as Chloe. Jennifer began a ‘mommy blog’ when Abby was little, and ‘Chloe’ is its main character. While Jennifer’s son is allowed a normal life, Abby isn’t. She’s not allowed to go to school, have friends, or make any of her own choices. She has to constantly perform as Chloe, and we see the horrific things that this leads to. And the story begins when Jennifer finds that her precious daughter is missing…

Jennifer is such a fascinating character. She’s dark and twisty. She sees her daughter only in terms of what Chloe can provide her. She treats her like a doll, wanting to control every aspect of her life. And she’ll do anything to make sure she gets her own way. And she lies. She lies a lot, and I was never quite sure when she was telling the truth. This made the tension so, so high. I couldn’t stop reading. She’d engineered an entire fake life for her daughter for her followers to watch. Chloe’s ‘friends’ were photoshopped models. Any time Abby really did start making friends of her own, Jennifer put a stop to it. She wanted her daughter isolated and dependent, and Jackson, Jennifer’s husband and Chloe’s father just lets it happen.

Jennifer is also a murderer. Part of the narrative is from the perspective of Emilina, the former best friend of Jennifer and the now detective investigating Chloe’s disappearance. Emilina knows exactly what kind of person Jennifer is, as Jennifer forced her to cover up the murder when they were kids. 

And that’s not the only murder in the book. We’ve also got the murder of Missy, a girl the same age as Chloe and who looks pretty similar to her. And it soon becomes clear the murder of Missy and the disappearance of Chloe are intrinsically connected.

Chloe/Abby is a fascinating character. I really felt for her, could feel her desperation through her journal entries as she tried to fight her controlling mother. Indeed, the journal was quite horrifying to read when it became apparent just how far Jennifer would go to make sure her daughter was doing what she wanted. There was a fantastic twist about the boy whom Abby was secretly getting to know. And we really see the effect of all this emotional abuse on Abby and learn how her mother’s behaviour has shaped her. Nothing is as it seems!

There are so many twists in this book. The pacing is spot-on, and I simply had to read it as quickly as possible to find out who was the evil mastermind—because no matter how hard I tried to work it out, I just couldn’t. Every time I thought I had a handle on one of the suspects, a new curveball was thrown into the mix.

We’ve got a lot of first person narrators—Jennifer, Emilina, Abby, and Jackson (Jennifer’s husband)—but it didn’t feel like too many and I was able to separate the narratives quite easily.

All in all, this is a highly recommended read. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for this ARC.

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Review: Shattered by C. Lee McKenzie

Shattered, A Story of Betrayal and Courage by C. Lee McKenzie
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

Courage put Libby Brown into the final selection for the Olympics, but betrayal crushed her spine and her chance at the Gold. Now she has two choices, use her courage to put her life back together, or remain shattered forever.

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Unfortunately this is a DNF at 19% for me. I had high hopes for this book, thinking it would be similar to Scars Like Wings by Erin Stewart and Faceless by Alyssa Sheinmel. As a disabled person myself, I’m always looking for stories of disability that are skilfully and sensitively told. Unfortunately, this wasn’t one of those for me.

Within a few chapters, I’d picked up on quite a few ableist sentences. When Libby becomes paralysed following a skiing accident, she tells readers, ‘I might as well be dead if I couldn’t walk or ski or do anything that I loved. I couldn’t imagine how it would be to be trapped in a wheelchair the rest of my life, and I willed that image to disappear.’ This immediately set off alarm bells for me as I’ve had so many people devalue my own life since becoming disabled, people telling me that they’d rather be dead than live as I do. I really didn’t like the idea of being ‘trapped’ in a wheelchair given that wheelchairs offer freedom to so many disabled people that they wouldn’t ordinarily have. Still, I persevered with this book. I thought maybe this was just Libby’s mindset at the start of her journey as she was still coping with her new reality. I was hoping to see a transformation in her mindset and her acknowledging that her earlier thoughts were harmful and ableist.

I don’t know if this does happen, as I stopped reading at chapter nine. The above quotes were around chapter three, but by chapter nine we had more ableism and I simply wasn’t enjoying the story. Reading was feeling like a chore. Another instance of ableism I picked out was this one, which Libby uses when ‘evaluating’ her new room mate at the rehab centre: ‘More to the point, how could a one-legged swimmer have three boyfriends and the attitude of the Dali Lama?’ Just, urgh. She uses the term ‘one-legged’ in a clearly negative way here and she’s just so judgemental of her new ‘friend’, only seeing the disability.

Leading on from that, I didn’t find Libby likeable, yet I also felt like I didn’t know her. There wasn’t a great deal of deep characterisation for her or any of the characters, in my opinion. And the writing was kind of clunky. The very first paragraph tells us about a girl, Etta, who wasn’t then in any of the first nine chapters again. There’s no mention of a first-person narrator in that paragraph, so I assumed at first that Etta was the main character and that it was a third-person narrative. That seemed like a really poor opening to me.

There was a lot of repetition of phrasing too. We’re constantly told that voices interrupt Libby’s thoughts when she’s in hospital, and so many chapters began in similar ways. For my day job, I work as a developmental editor for a publisher and I’m a writing teacher, and there were just so many little things like this that I would’ve flagged if I’d been editing it. These things just meant I couldn’t get into the story to enjoy it.

And there were some big pacing issues—the characters constantly refer to important things that have happened off-page that the reader doesn’t actually witness. One major example of this is how suddenly were told Libby has a boyfriend when she’s at the rehab centre and sees her roommate with hers. I didn’t spot any mention of Libby having a boyfriend prior to this, but then we’re told that all this time the boyfriend had been trying to get in contact with her. That seemed like an afterthought and I couldn’t work out why this hadn’t been incorporated more smoothly into the narrative earlier on.

And then Libby and her boyfriend break up. Take a look at this passage:

“It’s okay,” I said quickly. “I asked you here to tell you that since things are so, well, different” —I held onto the arms of the wheelchair like a lifesaver— “I’ll understand if you have to move on. Your degree. Your life. You know.” I had to stop so my voice didn’t catch. “Hey, but thanks for coming by.”
For the first time our eyes connected.
“I’m sticking if you want me to.” Now his voice sounded pinched, maybe panicked. He’s afraid I’ll take him up on his offer. It wasn’t so much how he’d said those words as it was the way he sat pulled away from me, ready to bolt for the door that made me flinch.
I shook my head. “No.” The word came out sharp and final. “I don’t think that’s necessary.”
[…]
“I’m really sorry—”
And that’s all you can come up with? Sorry was such a limp word.
I shook my head. “Not your fault. I was in the wrong place at the wrong time.” I couldn’t help wondering what would have happened if Ben had pulled himself out of bed that morning and gone with me. He might have taken the hit instead of me. He might have heard the snowboarder coming at us and shoved me out of the way.
“I know, but I, well I’m just—”
“Don’t be.” I did not want to hear the word sorry from him. I hadn’t expected our meeting to go this way. I’d expected him to protest more. I hadn’t expected my heart to shrink when he turned his back and vanished out the door.

This was the point that really got to me, Like, I understood Libby’s feelings. I’d felt that before, being convinced no one would want me for my disability—but I wanted either him to fight for her here or for her to just be angry or something. Instead, she’s just accepting of it. I don’t know if we get more on this later, if I’m fact Libby does realise she still has worth. But this, combined with the earlier ableism and the pacing issues, just meant I couldn’t read any further.

In fact, the only thing that had kept me reading that far was the mystery element, that we know that the ski accident wasn’t an accident. Someone had paid a guy to cause the accident. I loved that, but it just wasn’t enough to keep me reading.

I feel bad giving this book one star, but it read like an unedited draft to me and the ableism was a big problem.

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Review: Flower Crowns and Fearsome Things by Amanda Lovelace

 

Flower Crowns and Fearsome Things by Amanda Lovelace
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

in her new standalone poetry collection, flower crowns & fearsome things, bestselling & award-winning poetess amanda lovelace explores the complexity of femininity through alternating wildflower & wildfire poems.

within these pages, you will find that each of us has the ability to be both soft & fierce at the same time. there is no need to choose one or the other.

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I finished this beautiful poetry collection on femininity last month and this was exactly the book I needed. The poetry is wonderfully written, so lyrical, and so powerful. The imagery is mesmerising, and I loved the motif of soft vs fierce.

There’s so much packed into these words, and the collection as a whole requires deep thought and contemplation afterward—I couldn’t simply dive into my next book as I needed to process what I’d read.

This collection is very feminist and it circles around abuse in a really sensitive but powerful way.

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