Author: Kathleen Hale
Publication Date: January 7th 2014
~A huge thank you to HarperTeen, and Edelweiss, who provided a copy in exchange for an honest review.~
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Small towns are nothing if not friendly. Friendship, Wisconsin (population: 688) is no different. Around here, everyone wears a smile. And no one ever locks their doors. Until, that is, high school sweetheart Ruth Fried is found murdered. Strung up like a scarecrow in the middle of a cornfield.
Unfortunately, Friendship’s police are more adept at looking for lost pets than catching killers. So Ruth’s best friend, Kippy Bushman, armed with only her tenacious Midwestern spirit and Ruth’s secret diary (which Ruth’s mother had asked her to read in order to redact any, you know, sex parts), sets out to find the murderer. But in a quiet town like Friendship—where no one is a suspect—anyone could be the killer.
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Small towns are nothing if not friendly. Friendship, Wisconsin (population: 688) is no different. Around here, everyone wears a smile. And no one ever locks their doors. Until, that is, high school sweetheart Ruth Fried is found murdered. Strung up like a scarecrow in the middle of a cornfield.
Unfortunately, Friendship’s police are more adept at looking for lost pets than catching killers. So Ruth’s best friend, Kippy Bushman, armed with only her tenacious Midwestern spirit and Ruth’s secret diary (which Ruth’s mother had asked her to read in order to redact any, you know, sex parts), sets out to find the murderer. But in a quiet town like Friendship—where no one is a suspect—anyone could be the killer.
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Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall,
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king's horses and all the king's men
Couldn't put Humpty together again.
The first thing you need to know about No One Else Can Have
You is that it's weird, and kind of like Humpty, you're immediately sucked in,
you start on a creepy ladder climbing high, and then it starts to fall, and it
never really gets put back together.
The town Friendship, population 689 is
a small closed knit town where everybody knows one another, everybody is
too friendly and nice and sickly like cough syrup. They talk to one another with
first and last names. Polite. Happy. Nothing-bad-happens-here-no-sirry-don'tcha
know. Did I mention they're friendly? sociopathic. They don't like bad
things, they sweep things under the rug and take a happy pill.
The populations now 688.When tragedy comes it's all falseness and sad smiles, trying to gain popularity and keeping up concerned appearances, and when it's assumed a killer is on the loose, they just want the murderer caught so they can go back to their perfect lives with their perfect town and pretend that it never happened.
Kippy Bushman isn't
that susceptible, and she wants the truth.
The feel of this book was really grimy and that first scene
can kind of give you nightmares.
Kippy Bushman, our dear weird narrator, takes it upon
herself to solve her best bitch of a friends -who was found in their outback cornfield- murder when it was apparent
the local police were pinning it on the wrong guy just because it was convenient.
Let's be blunt here, Kippy really is uh, peculiar , and obsessive, and a
ticking time bomb. She's a little stiff, kind of emotionless at times, she's
not someone you could like easily, or at
all.
She's a little psychotic, and has tones of issues, flaws and
has the knack to be really irritable and unlikeable, her personality is really clingy
and obtuse. And whatever you do, don't hug the thing, she bites, but it all
comes across as quirky, don't ask me how, but it does.
The best friend - and victim- in question, Ruth, was...how
do I put this lightly? A bitch.
She kind of turned into a less of one the more of her
journal you read, but I mean the girl was comparing dick-not my word- sizes,
with pictures.
Also, considering she's supposed to be 18, her diary read
like a twelve year olds, and really what's in that journal is not appropriate to the voice. She was
whiny and mean, all tons of juvenile.
I really had trouble with this book. It's the dark humour
that kept me reading, and it is quite addictive, but I had some serious problems with it.
Everything was just kind of...skewered. Jokes about serious things that should
not be joked about, because really, it is not
funny and is never okay to have it read like it's nothing and something to
be breezed over. There were lots of flimsy comments about domestic violence,
and well, violence in general, mental
disabilities and even rape comes up in a sentence, and it's kind of like just
thrown, no heaviness behind it, just here wind, take it.
But seriously, you get the feel that one misstep and someone
could seriously flip it and just kill the whole town. Definitely a
on-the-edge-of-your-seat-creepy-shit.
The way Colt was portrayed, and the reactions from the town
is kind of like a witch hunt, and yeah, the guy was all kinds of a douche, I
mean, he attacked mail boxes for fun. Poor mailboxes. Uhm, I was trying to come
up with an excuse to why he didn't deserve it? *scratches head*
Anyway, I had three major suspects in my head, and 70% in I
thought it was going a certain way and that it would be such an amazing plot
twist if it did go there and pulled it off, and it seemed like it was. And it
would have been awesome. Then 85% in, it's flipped and backed out and chose an
easier option of my suspect number two. I'm a little bummed it wasn't the first
one, so I'm a little disappointed. But, if it had gone there, oh it would have
been perfect.
You know what though? I couldn't feel it for the first half,
and I promised myself to get there so I have a better view, and when I did, I seriously just had to find
out, and it did deliver, even if it wasn't the way I wanted. I might go sulk.
For all its weirdness and creepy...it was an addictive read, just like Pretty Little Liars.
Actual Rating: 3.5/5
