I’ve long thought that Karen M. McManus’ books are going steadily down in quality, but boy on boy was I not ready for how bad this was. It started off slow and with a fairly odd premise, but I gave it a shot and kept going, except the more I read the worst it got. Honestly wtf? To me this story didn’t feel promising at all, but I strongly believed a better author could have expertly pulled it off. Where do I even start? It makes no sense to me that Tripp ‘loved’ Brynn and yet made sure to purposefully hurt her to push her away just because he thought his dad stole some money? I means yeah that’s bad but come on is it bad enough to publicly shame someone you love and push them away for YEARS? No, I think not. Does it make any sense whatsoever that after we were told how much Brynn still hurt after this even years later, she went right back to not only forgiving him, but now loving him? These characters had promise, I liked that Brynn could be the new Pip Fitz-Amobi or the new Stevie Bell, I loved her sister and how supportive she was, and I even liked her friend group at her new school. Yet all these characters were severely underdeveloped, and that’s not even the worst of it. The storyline was such a mess it was painful to read, especially when I found out we don’t even get an answer as to who committed the crime?? All we get is a brief conversation alluding to the possibility of a murder and nothing else. There was absolutely no feeling of relief or happiness when Brynn and Tripp got together because they never seemed to not be together at all for most of the book! They kept throwing half baked theories out way as to who  the murderer was just to make everyone an innocent angel and leave it open ended!? This book gets 2 stars from me, and you can tell from my profile I’m normally very generous. The 2 stars are for the characters I liked, even though they were completely butchered by the nonsensical storyline.