Review: Far From You by Tess Sharpe

★★★☆☆

This is going to be a short review, because the simple truth is that this might be the perfect book for a lot of people, but it wasn't for me.

The balance of the murder mystery with the relationship drama didn't sit well with me for some reason, in this book. Other books have done it perfectly well, but there was just something about this one that I couldn't wrap my head around. It seemed like the mystery was solved in the first half of the book-- at least in all of the details I cared about, like motive. We knew why Mina was killed, so I didn't really care who did it. Once I knew the motive, continuing with that particular plotline seemed redundant to me, and I couldn't get into it. (True fact: when I found myself halfway done with the book, tired of the repetition of certain discoveries and feelings, I decided to skip to the last 10 pages or so and read the end. I did not feel like I had missed a single thing.)

As far as the relationships, I thought the book did really well with some things and not so well with others. The love triangle was done in a believable way, with realistic doses of bitterness and confusion, and even the way Sophie's parents treated her after Mina's death-- when they thought she had relapsed-- seemed realistic, for two parents who had gone through seeing their daughter endure a life-altering injury and a drug addition. But I didn't feel like there was enough character to every character, if that makes sense. I felt like I had no sense of the small details of Mina that made everyone love her so much, and that vagueness spread to every other character except Sophie, who was the only one I felt like I truly understood.

All of that said, it was not a bad book. Sophie is a character I didn't feel like I had met before, and her story both gritty and tender. This just wasn't my book, in the way that sometimes you can feel like you connect to a character or a story but something keeps you from connecting to the book as a whole.