The plot synopsis above gives you a very accurate picture of what goes on in the story. Tess went through something horrific, and she has to face it head on whenever she goes to her mother’s house.

I only gave this book 2 stars because there is a lot of telling and not a lot of showing. The timeline jumps, what feels like, every other page. Tess’s full story is told through a series of flashbacks, which is usually a great method to slowly show something to the reader. In this case, however, none of the flashbacks were fleshed out enough for them to feel important. Instead of learning about Tess in a natural way, almost her entire story was told to me.

I’ll stress the “almost” in the line above, because there were moments where Bre Woods used fantastic figurative language. For instance, Tess refers to the pain of her mother’s gaze as a “razor pressed against skin or the jagged ends of an egg shell puncturing the yolk.” So, there are definitely moments of beauty.