Thank you to NetGalley for an ARC of Things Don't Break on Their Own.

When a book is called literary, I know what it means: great writing, but no suspense or drama. No offense.

I love mysteries and thrillers, it's pretty much the only genres I read, but this was neither a mystery or a thriller.

The premise does sound thrilling, but the narrative is nothing more than flashbacks about Willa and Robyn's relationship in boarding school, the domestic violence permeating Willa's family life, when Willa met Jamie, etc etc.

The narrative was mostly filler and Laika's disappearance/reappearance only takes up a quarter of the novel, at best.

The writing is good (like I said, literary) but the story tedious, plodding and the characters unlikable, not detestable, mostly one dimensional.

Let me put it this way, I wouldn't want to have dinner with most of them. Maybe Nate.

But the real kicker, the one that made me stop reading immediately was how Laika finds her way back to Willa and her family.

What are the odds she ends up with Nate?

I don't like when coincidences or deus ex machina or any corny/lame literary device are used to resolve a plot hole(s).

This was an interesting book. I don’t know why we had to have some of it from Robyn’s perspective because her “voice” was pretty similar to Willa’s and that was a little confusing early on. I didn’t feel like she added a lot of insight to the main plot since she didn’t know what the house Willa grew up in was a lot.

I felt like someone should have said something about the enormous coincidence of “Claudette” dating Robyn’s partner’s brother and thus reuniting with her sister. I also thought the part about Willa impulsively going to Thailand was out of character and didn’t serve the plot since everyone quickly believed “Claudette” when all was revealed.

I did think they hinted at the dad being involved in human trafficking and thought it was odd they didn’t explore that more.

Solid book but a little uneven and at time felt like it was written for young readers which made some of the scenes at boarding school jarring.