Don't Look Back by Jennifer L Armentrout Review

WARNING: THERE MAY BE SPOILERS BELOW

“Things aren’t perfect. They are far, far from it,but they are getting there, and I wasn’t looking back. Not when there were so many good things in the future.”- Don't Look Back, Jennifer L Armentrout

Samantha is a stranger in her own life. Until the night she disappeared with her best friend, Cassie, everyone said Sam had it all - popularity, wealth, and a dream boyfriend. 

Sam has resurfaced, but she has no recollection of who she was or what happened to her that night. As she tries to piece together her life from before, she realizes it's one she no longer wants any part of. The old Sam took "mean girl" to a whole new level, and it's clear she and Cassie were more like best enemies. Sam is pretty sure that losing her memories is like winning the lottery. She's getting a second chance at being a better daughter, sister, and friend, and she's falling hard for Carson Ortiz, a boy who has always looked out for her-even if the old Sam treated him like trash. 

But Cassie is still missing, and the truth about what happened to her that night isn't just buried deep inside of Sam's memory - someone else knows, someone who wants to make sure Sam stays quiet. All Sam wants is the truth, and if she can unlock her clouded memories of that fateful night, she can finally move on. But what if not remembering is the only thing keeping Sam alive?

Yes, I have been on a thriller kick lately. There's just something about spring that makes me want to reach for the dark and twisted.

I'm also apparently a bit of a masochist. Sometimes, I like to pick up the other novels of authors that have caused me pain in the past because I want to read some work that might be fun to read in a bad way. Hence Jennifer L Armentrout.

If you'll remember, I hated The Problem With Forever. Hated it. It made number 11 on my Worst Books of 2016 list if I remember correctly, and probably would have been even higher if I didn't read so many bad books in 2016. But for some reason, maybe my mind twisting things to make me feel better, I look back on my reading experience of The Problem With Forever as being, well, a lot of fun. Laughing at the idiocy of Mouse and making fun of Pretty Boy and all that. A The Cellar kind of bad, if you will. So naturally I thought I could replicate that same feeling with Don't Look Back.

Yes, this is a lot of rationalization for why the hell I picked this book up. Because once I started reading it, I started to regain my real memories of reading The Problem With Forever in a very real life imitating plot kind of way. Because this book caused me to remember just how absolutely painful it was to read The Problem With Forever. 

This book hurt to read. I think there's something about Armentrout's style that grates on me. Maybe it's the obvious quotes or pretty writing that just feels so forced. Maybe it's how much filler went in to bloat what should have been a 200 page book into a 376 page book. Now, this might just be personal preference, but I find that the page count from crime novels can and even should number in the high 300s/400s, but YA thrillers should be maybe in the low 300s. Because the protagonists are usually teenagers, they shouldn't have the resources to form a suspect list the way detectives do. Typically, only one person should be at suspect in YA thrillers, and then there could be a twist at the end where it turns out to be someone else. It just makes so much more sense because, again, the protagonist is a teenager with no formal detective training but a few episodes of Law and Order. 

Honestly, this book reminded me of Tragedy Girl in that it was really a romantic contemporary with some mystery elements, but the mystery elements always took a backseat to romantic and friend drama, though it's marketed and sold as a mystery. And Sam was insufferable. Seriously, Armentrout needs help writing characters that don't act like cliches. The whole story arc of her and Carson and the rich bitches acting above everyone else was so stereotypical and made me roll my eyes several times. And Sam drove me crazy, always acting like she was better than all her old friends. I think at one point she commented that the girls (her old friends) could use a doughnut and honestly that just pissed me off. Don't tell a fucking skinny girl to eat a doughnut if you wouldn't tell a fat girl to eat a salad, bitch. Again, her and Carson were such cliches and it pissed me off that Armentrout did basically the same thing that she did in The Problem With Forever, but role reversed so Sam was basically cheating on her boyfriend with Carson. Sure, they broke up eventually, but still, she should have broken up with Del the minute she started feeling something for Carson. 

I can't believe I'm about to say this, but this book makes me miss Cracked Up to Be. It's obvious that Armentrout read that book, and thought she could basically do the exact same thing, but instead attempt to make Sam an actually likable main character. See, Cracked Up to Be is probably my favorite Courtney Summers book, which isn't saying much, but still it's because I liked Parker. I liked how even though she still acted like a bitch even though she lost her evil posse. She was still snobby and overall mean-girl, but she was a fun perspective to follow. In comparison to Sam, who was oddly enough still retained some of her personality- the likeable aspects of her personality, oddly enough- but all of her negative traits were wiped clean, making her basically perfect. And annoying as all hell. I remember one part when this goth boy basically stepped into her and her friend's conversation to say something rude when the conversation had nothing to do with him, the friend insulted him back, and Sam felt angry at the friend and later apologized to the goth boy for the insult that was honestly coming to him. That just pissed me off.

The mystery was bad. I don't feel much like talking about it except to say ugh, because it was so underdeveloped and so secondary to everything else that was going on. I was kind of excited for a second because it was briefly hinted that Carson was the killer, but nope. Of course Armentrout wouldn't have made the love interest the killer, what was I thinking? The actual killer wasn't that great, and felt very unrealistic and soap-opera-y. Did not like.

So, what do I think? Thumbs down. This book was long and painful and horrible to read. No risks were taken, nothing to distinguish it from every other YA thriller out there. I think I'd rather pull my teeth out than read anything by Jennifer L Armentrout again. 

3 out of 10