Vanishing Girls by Lauren Oliver

Published March 10th 2015

“Dara and Nick used to be inseparable, but that was before the accident that left Dara’s beautiful face scarred and the two sisters totally estranged. When Dara vanishes on her birthday, Nick thinks Dara is just playing around. But another girl, nine-year-old Madeline Snow, has vanished, too, and Nick becomes increasingly convinced that the two disappearances are linked. Now Nick has to find her sister, before it’s too late.

In this edgy and compelling novel, Lauren Oliver creates a world of intrigue, loss, and suspicion as two sisters search to find themselves, and each other.”

I’ve read all of Lauren Oliver’s YA books except Requiem and I’ve always enjoyed her books. She has such a distinct style and vibe to her books. I feel like even if her name wasn’t on the cover, once I started reading the book, I could tell for sure that it was a Lauren Oliver book.
I think all her books have mixed reviews and it’s kind of a toss up if someone will love or hate her books. I personally like her stand-alones way more then the Delirium series and even though I seen a lot of mixed her reviews for Vanishing Girls, I knew that I’d want to it no matter what. Lauren is definitely an auto buy author for me.
I definitely think Vanishing Girls was exactly what I thought it was going to be and I liked it exactly how much I thought that I would.

It’s hard to explain how I feel about Vanishing Girls because it’s very Young Adult in a way that I didn’t find to have a whole of anything.
I felt like the plot was all over the place and disorganized. So insanely messy. It bounced from Dara’s POV to Nick’s. From website posts to personal messages to diary entries. From “before” to “after”. Just a whole lot of mess. I had a hard time keeping things in order in my head and towards the last half of the book, I felt really frustrated because I couldn’t remember what was going on and I just really wanted to know what was happening. Every time I picked this book up, it felt like starting a tv show in the middle of season 5.

The writing style was so Lauren Oliver. On one hand, it was nice to feel already comfortable with the writing style but on the other hand, I wanted something new and different. If you’ve read Lauren’s books in the past and didn’t like the writing style, you won’t like Vanishing Girls.

The characters are fairly good. I liked Nick a lot more over Dara, just because I couldn’t stand Dara’s attitude and I felt like she was written with the sole purpose to be disliked by the reader. I couldn’t understand her reasoning for the things she did and I was frustrated with her 100% of the time.

The pace was really quick. I was able to buzz though this book fairly fast. There wasn’t a whole lot of boring parts but I felt like the first half was kind of slow.

Overall, Vanishing Girls was a pretty good read. I enjoyed it for most part. It’s not my favorite book by Lauren but I still liked it. The plot was pretty empty of substance and it was confusing at times. It actually reminded me a lot of Pretty Little Liars. Entertaining but not the most intricate.