If You Were Here by Alafair Burke

 

I picked this up because it sounded at least vaguely interesting from the cover library when I was at the library. It was ... at least vaguely interesting. Not particularly plausible or believable, and not like gripping; but vaguely interesting. There's some misdirection that starts spiraling in around the end of the novel, as lies pile up to an almost fissionable critical mass--some of that is at least skittering around the edges of stupid twists, but the vast majority of it's building on things in ways that at least sort of make sense. The roughness in the late-beginning through the early-end, as the novel tries be all multi-threaded, does clear up as things come back together through the end. There's probably more autobiography in this novel than is absolutely ideal, but Ms. Burke has taken good care to file the serial numbers off, no one's gonna get sued over this. I'm not over-impressed, here, but it wasn't a horrible evening's read; I never seriously considered DNFing.