The Leaving by Tara Altebrando

The Leaving by Tara Altebrando
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Eleven years ago six kindergartners went missing from their school with the search turning up absolutely nothing to what had happened to them. The families tried their best to go on with their lives slowly losing hope over the years that they would ever be returned.

Now, at sixteen, five of the missing children have returned. The teenagers are foggy and think that they have been drugged but have absolutely no memory of what had happened to them for the last eleven years. With only glimpses of memories to give any sort of clue everyone of course wants answers to where they have been and what had happened to them.

The Leaving is a young adult mystery/thriller told from multiple POVs of those involved in the story. It’s written in a somewhat poetic prose style. Definitely a unique writing style for this type of story so I was kind of hoping for something good to come out of the story with the uniqueness but in the end I was rather disappointed.

The story started off completely engaging me and I couldn’t wait to keep reading and find out what had happened to these kids. Unfortunately it didn’t take too long for the pace to completely slow down and perhaps even stall out a bit for me and found myself losing interest.

Once finished with this book I found myself with yet another disappointment unfortunately. The book is in the thriller family that seems to give you the situation, point to a solution then wrap up with something out of nowhere. This formula doesn’t work for me since I like to have clues and suspects and try to figure things out myself while I read.

Overall, unusual writing style, an amazingly gripping story line but unfortunately fell short for me with the execution.