After Anna

By Alex Lake

[A girl is missing. Five years old,

taken from outside her school.

She has vanished, traceless.

The police are at a loss; her parents are

beyond grief. Their daughter is lost

forever - perhaps dead,

perhaps enslaved.

But the biggest mystery is yet to

come: one week after she was abducted,

Anna is returned.

She has no memory of where she

has been. And this, for her mother,

is just the beginning of

the nightmare...]

I really wasn't impressed with this at all.

The plot was hella predictable the entire way through. Not to mention it kept contradicting itself along the way. 

At one moment Julia states her mother is in a nursing home, the next minute she states she's dead and then in a further chapter she goes and visits said dead mother in the nursing home, whaaaat?! It needed a bit more consistency if I'm being honest.

And further to that, I literally hated all of the main characters. They were so unlikeable it was annoying. The funny thing is they were relatable. Maybe that's what made them such annoying characters, I don't know. 

I can't pinpoint an exact reason why I didn't like Julia, she did the best she could in the circumstances thrown her way, I just didn't click with her. 

Brian and Edna though, I loathed. Brian because he was a spineless pushover letting his mother get exactly what she wanted and Edna because she was a manipulative old hag stuck in her old fashioned ways.

The only thing I did like was the perspective of the kidnapper's chapters. Using second person is always an interesting technique so it was a nice way to freshen up the book. The chapters for the main part were also set out pretty weirdly, in separate sections within each other. I don't know, I found it quite odd.

Maybe I just don't get on with these types of books. I'm never truly satisfied with whoever has supposedly committed the crime because, to me, it's always obvious who it is pretty early on.

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