Never Too Many To Read : Blog Tour: Beautiful Broken Girls by Kim Savage...Review & Giveaway!

Beautiful Broken Girls
by Kim Savage
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR)
Release Date: February 21st 2017

Genre: Young Adult, Mystery, Contemporary

Synopsis:

Mira and Francesca Cillo—beautiful, overprotected, odd—seemed untouchable. But Ben touched seven parts of Mira: her palm, hair, chest, cheek, lips, throat, and heart. After the sisters drown themselves in the quarry lake, a post-mortem letter from Mira sends Ben on a quest to find notes in the seven places where they touched. Note by note, Ben discovers the mystical secret at the heart of Mira and Francesca's world, and that some things are better left untouched.

Kim Savage is the author of AFTER THE WOODS, a debut psychological thriller for young adults coming on Feb 23, 2016 with Farrar, Straus and Giroux/Macmillan. Her second thriller for young adults comes from FSG is 2017. Before writing fiction, she worked as business journalist, pitching stories along the lines of “Stigmatized Properties: When Murder Kills Property Values”. You get the idea.

Title: Beautiful Broken Girls

Author: Kim Savage

Format: Digital ARC

Source: Netgalley

So, I have been sitting here trying desperately to put my thoughts about this book into words. I enjoyed this book, but much like it's title, while Beautiful Broken Girls is a hauntingly beautiful story, there were some parts that just didn't work for me...that were broken.

Having never read any of Kim Savage's work, I was really looking forward to reading this one because I've heard such great thing about her writing. And she definitely is a talented writer with vivid (sometimes almost too vivid) descriptions and emotion poured into each page and character. Yet somehow, this book just didn't wow me as I hoped it would when I read the blurb and saw the cover.

There is no doubt that Beautiful Broken Girls is a heavy and emotional story. After the girl he loves, Mira, and her sister are found dead, Ben is desperate to know why and what happened. Much to his surprise, Mira has left Ben a series of notes in locations where he had once touched her that he hopes will provide him with some answers. Ben, driven to find these answers embarks on this scavenger hunt, but with each new note, he is only left with more questions as he replays every moment he spent with Mira and her family.

Through flashbacks from both Ben and the girls' perspective we are slowly given hints of what might have happened and led to the death of the girls as we learn more about Ben and the other characters in the story; characters, who definitely seem to have their own motives for finding (or not finding) out what went on with these girls. At times, the flashbacks were a bit confusing and vague leaving me with more questions than answers, but like pieces of a puzzle they eventually come together to form the whole picture...a picture I definitely wasn't expecting and that didn't quite work for me.

The book tackles several emotional subjects and I don't want to spoil things, but this is definitely not a light read. The story also took some strange and unexpected twists and turns that left me wondering where exactly it was going and what I had missed. Just when you think you might have it figured out...nope, here comes a new curveball as we learn something new about the characters. Each new revelation kept me reading because I had to know what was going on and whether or not it was relevant to the whole story. I became as determined as Ben to find out exactly what had happened to these girls as well as wanting to know more about other characters.

However, while the premise of Beautiful Broken Girls had such promise and I enjoyed the story, I found myself feeling a bit let down and I am not even sure I could pinpoint exactly why. The story was interesting, if not what I had hoped for or expected, and the writing was lovely so while this book was not really for me, I would (and will) definitely try other books by the author. It was a good, if not great, book that I enjoyed reading, but not what I was expecting. But like all books, other readers might have a different take on things.