SILENT SISTER by Megan Davidhizar is an impressive Young Adult thriller debut about two sisters who go missing on a class trip. The senior sabbatical is supposed to be fun and enlightening, but when the sisters go missing and only one later returns with serious injuries, no one knows what to believe and what really happened on that dark, stormy night.
Grace Stoll is popular and makes friends easily. She’s a star volleyball player and has earned a scholarship to college. Maddy Stoll lives in her sister’s shadow. Maddy is quiet, and reserved, likes writing poetry, has one good friend, and she just learned she didn’t receive the writing scholarship she needed for college. Now the sisters are attending their senior sabbatical at Shady Oaks Lodge with several classmates and two school chaperones. When the two sisters go missing one night, a storm rages on, and only Grace is later found injured on a county road. Maddy is missing and Grace cannot remember a thing. As classmates close ranks, the police take Grace’s phone into custody, and Grace grapples with her memories; somewhere out there lies the truth. Will Maddy be coming home, or will Grace have to face the future without her?
SILENT SISTER is the suspenseful dissection of the relationship between two very different sisters. Can you love and resent someone at the same time? The tension builds when Maddy disappears and the theories start surfacing. Everything from sister jealousies, improper teacher relationships, best-friend betrayals, and a past secret tragedy from eighth grade. As the surviving sister tries to recall her memories, she doesn’t know who she can trust and why her classmates and family are treating her so suspiciously. Told in alternating POVs and dual timelines, there is plenty of tension and action to drive the story forward and several plausible outcomes to keep readers guessing. The ending is surprising, with an effective twist and a nice romantic conclusion. There is a little too much explanatory writing at the end, but overall, SILENT SISTER is an impressive debut, and readers will look forward to future novels by this author.
The must-read suspense novel of the summer about a mysterious sister's disappearance, her biggest betrayal and a deadly truth screaming to come out. Two sisters went missing on their class trip—Grace, the outgoing athlete who is friends with just about everyone, and Maddy, the wallflower wilting in her sister’s shadow who'd rather absorb herself in her journal than talk to her classmates. But when Grace is found—injured, with no memory of what happened—everybody thinks she’s lying. It’s hard not to look guilty with Maddy’s blood on her clothes. Desperate to save her sister—and prove her own innocence—Grace must piece together what happened on that school trip with the help of her sister’s notebook and classmates who may not be telling the police everything that about that tragic night. She will discover her sister’s secrets can’t stay quiet…but what if her own are the most terrifying of all?
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