Review: The Half Life of Molly Pierce by Katrina Leno

The Half Life of Molly Pierce by Katrina Leno
Publisher: HarperTeen
Release Date: July 8, 2014
Purchase: Amazon / B&N

You take it for granted. Waking up. Going to school, talking to your friends. Watching a show on television or reading a book or going out to lunch.

You take for granted going to sleep at night, getting up the next day, and remembering everything that happened to you before you closed your eyes.

You live and you remember.

Me, I live and I forget.

But now—now I am remembering.

For all of her seventeen years, Molly feels like she’s missed bits and pieces of her life. Now, she’s figuring out why. Now, she’s remembering her own secrets. And in doing so, Molly uncovers the separate life she seems to have led…and the love that she can’t let go.

The Half Life of Molly Pierce is a suspenseful, evocative psychological mystery about uncovering the secrets of our pasts, facing the unknowns of our futures, and accepting our whole selves.

My Thoughts:
This was a strange book for me.  These types of stories normally really pull me in, but there was just something about this one that really left me feeling kinda blah.  Looking back at other stories like this I remember feeling that oh no what's happening and oh no she has a mental illness and its so sad.  With this story though I didn't have those feelings.  I kept waiting for them but they never really showed up.  Okay well at the very end I had a little feeling but by then it was a little too late.

The story is really summed up if you read the back of the book which I was I hadn't done.  Normally I skip the back because you never know what it is going to say and sometimes it is fun to just dive in and not know what's coming.  Well this time I decided to read it and unfortunately the whole story was displayed on that back cover!  I wish I could tell the powers that be to take it off.  What makes these types of stories interesting at least to me is finding out what the hidden problem is.  In this story Molly has big time gaps where she can't remember anything.  She wakes up after several hours sometimes not knowing how she got home and what happened in the time she was blacked out.  If you read the back cover then you know why this is and honestly if you have read similar stories then you can work it out, but I really wanted to work it out for myself.  I didn't want to be told so anyway that was I guess my first problem.  After finding out the whys of her black outs I kinda felt like there was no point reading on.

My second problem with this book was the writing itself.  It was just too much.  It felt like the author wanted to make her prose as pretty as possible and there were just too many things going on.  I would have rather the author use the short amount of pages that she had focusing on the whys and the whens.  I wanted to know why Molly felt like she had to create this person.  I wanted to know when it started and what made her feel so depressed.  I get that sometimes these things can't be explained but I wanted the author to at least try a little harder.

Molly was an okay character.  I didn't really feel connected to her, but I didn't feel completely disconnected either.  I felt more for her at the end when things all came to conclusion, but again I wanted to know more.  I feel like I billion strings have been left dangling and I hate that when I read a story especially knowing this is a stand alone.  The other characters I didn't particularly like with the exception of Hazel and Clancy.  Molly's friends were just irritating and Sayer was just kinda there.  I don't know if I really want what the ending implied I think it would be just too weird.  The author does throw in a strange side character Bret and for me at least I wish that line would have been explored.  Not sure what his purpose was as it stands so I wish that would have been developed.

All in all this wasn't a bad book.  Yes I know I listed several things that I didn't like, but I did find somethings enjoyable.  The end is what really helped me with my rating. I though the author did an okay job at wrapping it all up.  I don't fully believe that things would have been that easy and I also don't believe that Molly would have been left by herself through everything.  It felt like okay Molly is going through this but we can't let her know so we are all going to stay quiet and let her figure it out for herself.  I don't know I would think as a parent this would be a lot harder to do.  Anyway though I am going to focus on the ending and let this book go.

2 snowflakes