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Saturday, September 4, 2021

Week 35 Review: Message Not Found

From Goodreads:
An emotionally complex portrayal of secrets, loss, and grief from Dante Medema, Indies Introduce author of the Indie Next Pick title The Truth Project.

Bailey and Vanessa shared everything: laughter, secrets, and packets of Pop Rocks to ward off bad days. But that all changed the night Vanessa left Bailey's, headed for home, and ended up swerving off a cliff nowhere near her house. Now Bailey, who thought she knew Vanessa better than anyone in the world, is left with a million unanswered questions, and the only person with answers is gone.

To help grieve her loss, Bailey creates a chat bot of Vanessa using years' worth of their shared text messages and emails. The more data she uploads to the bot, the more it feels like she’s really talking to her best friend. That is, until the bot starts dropping hints that there was more going on with Vanessa than Bailey realized—a secret so big, it may have contributed to Vanessa’s death.

My Review:
Oh man, this was such an impactful book! Bailey is grieving the loss of her best friend, Vanessa, and given that she's in a family of programmers, makes a chat bot to simulate talking with her again. It was such a great read! 

And it was a quick one. Half of the pages were the text conversations she was having with everybody. Most of the chapters were a page or two long, only a couple of them longer. So it just flew right on by, I finished it so quickly! 

These characters were so fantastic to read about! Bailey was a devoted best friend to the book girl,Vanessa (loved reading about a fellow book lover, though sad that this book is about her death) but there's a mystery to her death, why she was on the road that she had her accident on. And learning why is a big part of her grieving process, with all the time that she pours into the chat bot. 

This book is about grief. And a big theme is that people are different, depending on who they're around--and other people might see the same situation a different way, because they have different facts. And this causes a lot of tension, because Vanessa kept secrets from Bailey, which Bailey is only finding out now.

This was a really great read, and I can't wait to read more by Dante Medema! 

Author: Dante Medema
Read: August 29th, 2021
Source: Edelweiss 
Reason Why: Sounded really good, and it's a SAC 2021 Book, Sophomore Challenge Book, and a WoW Book!
Publisher: Quill Tree Books
Expected Publication: March 29th 2022
5/5 Hearts
5/5 Books
5/5 Stars

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