Thursday, April 5, 2018

leave the past in the past

My Name is Venus Black by Heather Lloyd
Rating: 4 stars (out of 5)
Genre: fiction
Review: All is not well in the Miller/Black household.  Mr. Miller is dead, for one thing, at the hands of his thirteen-year-old stepdaughter, Venus, who doesn't deny that she killed him, but blames her mother for not taking action to stop... something.  A few days after Venus is arrested for doing... whatever she did that resulted in her stepfather's death... her little brother Leo, who is intellectually handicapped, goes missing, but Venus, being in juvenile detention, can't do anything to help find him, which seems to be the hardest part about being in jail, as far as she's concerned.

Skip forward 6 years to when Venus is released and sets out to try to restart her life in something resembling a normal fashion.  Possibly the reader is supposed to still care about what actually happened on that fateful night in 1980 (and the events leading up to it), and I did, but I found myself much more interested in Venus as a character than as a sensationalized news story.  Rest assured, we do find out what happened and why Venus is so mad at her mother, but her current story is much more interesting, and that's what kept me turning the pages.

FTC Disclaimer: I received this book from the publisher in exchange for this review.

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