Tuesday, July 21, 2015

Untraceable by S.R. Johannes book review

16-year-old Grace has lived in the Smokies all her life, patrolling with her forest ranger father who taught her about wildlife, tracking, and wilderness survival. 

When her dad goes missing on a routine patrol, Grace refuses to believe he’s dead and fights the town authorities, tribal officials, and nature to find him.

One day, while out tracking clues, Grace is rescued from danger by Mo, a hot guy with an intoxicating accent and a secret. As her feelings between him and her ex-boyfriend get muddled, Grace travels deep into the wilderness to escape and find her father. 

Along the way, Grace learns terrible secrets that sever relationships and lives. Soon she’s enmeshed in a web of conspiracy, deception, and murder. And it’s going to take a lot more than a compass and a motorcycle (named Lucifer) for this kick-butting heroine to save everything she loves.


My rating: 3/5


I received an ARC from the Publisher in Exchange for an honest review.

Grace has lived with her father her entire life, learning about nature, how to take care of it and how to stay safe in it. So when her father disappears she refuses to believe the local authorities who assume he is dead, and goes out to find clues to prove he must still be alive, whether he might be, however, is a mystery.

I was very impressed by the main character, Grace, at the beginning. She knows her father couldn’t have simply died and left no clue, he taught her everything she knows and is convinced that, if anybody can survive out there, it’s her father. So she begins her journey to try and find evidence so that the authorities take the matter seriously, leaving them with no other alternative than to investigate the matter further.

However, as the story progressed I found grace to be a contradictory character, stubborn, egocentric, and even not very bright. She assumes every piece of evidence that she finds is connected to her father, every broken branch, every torn leaf must have been made by him or his captors, it was borderline paranoid.

Moreover, the smart, brave girl we meet at the beginning somehow disappears around the middle of the book, and is replaced by someone who, instead of collecting and piecing together solid proof that her father is alive, runs and cries when she finds what she was looking for, only to add more “tension” to the narration in having Grace and her mysterious helper, going back and forth in the search for evidence.

The love story was a bit contrived, if I’m being honest. Grace behaved badly towards anybody under any circumstance, so it was a little hard to believe people could actually like her.
I was mostly intrigued by the mystery of what happened to her father, why did he disappear without a trace? What happened? However, the narration and especially Grace’s back and forth with finding the evidence made of the reading slightly annoying.

In the end, this was a decent story but as a mystery perhaps not so much.



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