The Lives of Desperate Girls by MacKenzie Common

🌟 out of 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟

Synopsis:
Sixteen-year-old Helen Commanda is found dead just outside Thunder Creek, Ontario. Her murder goes unremarked, except for the fact that it may shed light on the earlier disappearance of Chloe Shaughnessy. Chloe is beautiful, rich and white. Helen is plain, and from the reservation. They had nothing in common except that they were teenage girls from an unforgiving small town. Only Chloe's best friend Jenny Parker knows exactly how unforgiving, but she's keeping some dangerous secrets of her own.

Jenny begins looking for answers about Helen's life and death, trying to understand larger questions about her town and her best friend. But what can a teenage girl really accomplish where adults have failed? And how much is Jenny actually complicit in a conspiracy of silence?

*I received this copy from the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review*

 

I thought that this book took an interesting direction by having one of the focuses be racism. Two girls are gone with one missing, possibly dead and the other murdered but the police are focusing on the missing white girl rather than the native young woman that was murdered. I'm not sure how realistic I found some the events in the book or the memories that people spoke about. Some things seemed to be a bit far-fetched which made them hard to believe.  Although, I assumed that the book was set in present day but if it was set sometime in the past it would be more realistic to me. 

The portions of the book that I enjoyed the most were the moments that were focused on Chloe.  However, they seemed as if they were few and far between so I found it difficult to keep reading. I wanted to delve more into her "secrets" in order to understand her mind set and what happened to her but the book focused more on Jenny and her reactions to everything. I found Jenny to be bland and uninteresting. Her reactions to things seemed blunted to me and her priorities were odd. It seemed like the book didn't have a focus. There were so many topics that were discussed that it was difficult to pinpoint where my attention was supposed to be. Is it Helen? Chloe? Jenny? It began to be confusing not to mention the romance aspect that is focused on quite a bit in the book.