Nova Ren Suma

Imaginary Girls

Dorian Avers

** spoiler alert **
            2.75, but one I want to keep on my shelf for awhile.
 Imaginary Girls is a story about Chloe and her older sister and protector Ruby. Their father has moved to another state and has a functioning family of his own and their alcoholic mother still lives in the same small town as them. In typical YA fashion Ruby is the beautiful and manipulative older sister that everyone wants or wants to be. Chloe loves her sister and praises this power that she wields over others, even when it's cruel and unnecessary. The book begins with a party at the reservoir. Ruby is 19 and Chloe is 14, hanging out with her sister's older friends. Ruby likes to tell tales and says that Chloe can swim all the way across the reservoir and back in the pitch black night and return with a souvenir from down below. The reservoir holds the flooded remains of a town called Olive, another thing that Ruby likes to tell her half truths about. Chloe believes she can do anything that Ruby says even if it seems near impossible. She begins swimming, but stops halfway feeling a chill in the water, then finding a boat with a dead classmate inside. Chloe must move to live with her father after that. Two years later Ruby reappears to bring Chloe back. Chloe returns to their small town, but the girl from the boat has come back to life, but it appears only Ruby and Chloe remember what happened two years ago. Throughout the rest of the book we get vague answers and dwindling power from Ruby. 
 I wanted to like this book, but every time I picked it up it took me at least 30 or so pages to get back into it. I haven't read YA in a while and I'm no longer a teen, so maybe that's why. This book took the cliched older sister template and did something different with it. I liked the surrealism of this book, but it seems like a case of a good, interesting idea, with a minimally executed plot and details. I didn't get to know any of the characters really, I didn't feel for any of them. Maybe annoyance at Ruby's inability to answer a question or other characters inability to fully ask one. I wasn't sad for London or worried for Ruby or Chloe. 
 I knew when I was about 100 pages from the end and nothing was getting wrapped up that there was probably going to be an unsatisfactory ending and I was right. It just kind of fizzled out, it came full circle and wasn't sloppy so there's that, but it was predictable. Towards the end, the abruptness of the reservoir flooding into their yard threw me off. A chapter just started like that and there wasn't a great description of it or enough worry in the two boys' behavior. Maybe if I would've read this a couple years ago I would've enjoyed it more. I don't know how old the author is, I know she has a Masters though. Her writing sounded young, like she was. Maybe it was just a voice she was using for the YA novel, but I wanted more. More depth, more emotion, more layers to the characters.

Imaginary Girls

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