Jade’s caretaker is a mysterious woman who claims to protect her. But from what? From whom? While recovering, Jade scours her memories for clues from threatening DMs to a deadly fire from her past. The more Jade reflects, the less the woman’s claims make sense. She needs to escape. But if her captor doesn’t kill her, the unforgiving swamp will—no matter how skilled a runner Jade is, or rather, was.
Accustomed to comfort and luxury, Jade must now scratch and claw to survive. She soon discovers the real threat is closer than she thought. And her picture-perfect life, like the swamp around her, conceals untold terrors.
When I requested an ARC (or Advanced Reader Copy, if you're new here) of this novel, I was immediately intrigued by the fact that Jade is an "influencer." Considering the level of parasocial relationships people can develop with those they follow online, I thought there was a lot of potential here for a really interesting psychological thriller.
Unfortunately, what I got was a promising concept buried beneath a mountain of bad decisions.
To be fair, we do get a glimpse into the not-so-glamorous side of being an influencer. Jade talks about the weird (and sometimes downright inappropriate) comments people leave on her social media posts, and we see how constantly chasing likes, views, and engagement has affected her. Interestingly enough, we also see how it has also affected her family, particularly her adoptive mother, Virginia, who seems more concerned with the money Jade might lose if she stops posting than with Jade's actual well-being. Which is especially problematic considering how blatantly Virginia is using her daughter to fund her own opulent lifestyle.
So yes, there was definitely something here. Unfortunately, Jade herself made it incredibly difficult for me to care about any of it.
For someone who is essentially responsible for funding her family's entire lifestyle, Jade has absolutely no backbone when it comes to standing up to them, particularly Virginia. It becomes obvious very early on that she's incapable of pushing back against the people around her, and that made it increasingly difficult to root for her as she continued to make one terrible decision after another.
I understand that Jade is paranoid, and honestly, she has good reason to be. But she takes that paranoia to such extremes that I eventually stopped trying to understand her thought process. And the frustrating part is that her reasoning isn't even consistent. She gets spooked during her wedding (not because she's having second thoughts about getting married, but because something from her past triggers her) and she takes off. That decision puts her in the exact situation that sets the rest of the book into motion.
Okay. I can work with that. But then, for much of the rest of the book, she essentially just...accepts her circumstances.
She gets bad vibes, she brushes them off. She realizes she's being lied to, she just goes with it. Eventually she finally tries to escape. And then she completely botches that escape because apparently leaving a perfectly good escape vehicle behind and continuing on foot is a better idea after investigating a building that has a literal tree growing through the middle of it. I don't know what other clue she needed that the place had been abandoned for quite some time. Then someone is killed, and she doesn't even stop to find out who it is before moving on.
At that point, I was just sitting there thinking, Jade, please. I am begging you to make one sensible decision.
Eventually, she ends up right back where she started, and from there the story shifts into rapid-fire mode. One thing happens, then another, then another, until I basically stopped trying to make everything make sense. I can see what the author was attempting to do with the big reveal. I really can. It just didn't land for me.
And then we get that final twist, which left me sitting there wondering if I had somehow missed an entire chapter. We're specifically told that Lucinda isn't old enough to belong to a certain demographic of people, only for the ending to reveal that she is, in fact, exactly that. And we're apparently supposed to accept that Jade was given an explanation for this, except...where was it? Because I certainly didn't feel like we were given enough information to make that revelation work.
Maybe I missed something. Maybe it was explained somewhere and I simply didn't connect the dots. But considering how much the ending relies on that information, I shouldn't have been left scratching my head and wondering what the hell just happened.
Overall, I think this is one of those books where everyone else sees the story that I am apparently missing. And that's okay. I see that this author has received a lot of praise for their other work, so I may give them another chance somewhere down the road. But unfortunately, this particular one just didn't deliver what I was hoping for.
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