Short Stories With Kandi

Fragments of The Lost- Megan Miranda

To start off, I have heard good things about this book, on this website and on another website called Get Underlined. Which meant I had pretty high expectations for this book. 

In Fragment’s of the Lost, this mystery is told through Jessa, the ex-girlfriend of the victim (Caleb) killed by a car accident on a bridge. When Jessa is given the duty by Caleb’s mother to clean out his room, she finds out that not everything is as it seems. Did Caleb really die on that God-forsaken bridge? 

This book has many pros to it as cons. The pros are that the set up of this book is different from other mystery books. Miranda did not tell her story by chronological time order but through objects of the victim- Caleb. Each object gives some type of story, which leads on to the investigation of Caleb’s death. Additionally, I really enjoyed Miranda’s beauty of her description. It felt very asthetic, supporting the mood of the entire book. 

The con to this book is that is was slow. Some of the objects mentioned in the book had nothing to do with Caleb’s death, but his background with his relationship to his ex-girlfriend, Jessa. Some of the pieces were fillers, and it really made the story slow for me. Quite frankly, I never really cared about his background and the little details of his life, but instead, I was looking for the exciting, suspenseful facts that turned the story around. But good news! Most of the information the reader gets has to do with, in some way, Caleb’s death and what really happened. The reason I thought the story was slow is that the pieces presented just wasn’t clear enough and I didn’t care until it was finally revealed to me that it actually was an important piece of information. It was until about the hundredth page of the book that things got more interesting. 

Furthermore, another con to this novel is the main narrator, Jessa, Caleb’s ex-girlfriend. She is the main character that actually solves the mystery. Throughout the story, I see all the wrong and shady things all of the characters have done- except Jessa. She is the cliche, faultless Mary Sue of the story. Because of that, it really made Jessa very one-sided and two dimensional. I felt like Miranda didn’t develop her character to the utmost extent, resulting in the reader, not really liking Jessa as much as he should. 

Throughout the book, I was worried that all the information and objects presented to me were just a series of short stories and nothing more. But no fear to you now! The final pro of this book is the ending. It was truly spectacular, I literally couldn’t put down the book when I got to the second part. I loved how Miranda tied all the ends together and explained what actually happened. I never saw it coming! 

Overall, I enjoyed this book. It may be slow toward the beginning and middle of the book, but it was worth reading because of the beauty of Miranda’s description, and the final punch ending of the book. I would give it three stars out of five.

I hope this review is a help to you. Thanks for reading!

Kandice