Book Review and GIVEAWAY: Dear Future Me, by Deborah O'Connor {ends 6/12}

Guest review by: Becki Bayley

MIRANDA

Saltburn, 2023: The morning of…

The day starts with an argument. Whispers that snip at the dawn air. It’s been like this for weeks, a horrible back and forth that feels like we are throwing the same rock at each other, over and over again.

After last night, though, our words have a new intensity, an urgency, like everything is about to come to a head.

In 2023, a class receives letters they wrote to themselves 20 years earlier. Some of the people are where they expected to be, in the life they had planned or expected. One person leaves her home only to die off the sea cliffs nearby, and her best friend wants to untangle what may have happened 20 years before to lead to this unexpected tragedy.

Official synopsis:

In 2003, Mr. Danler's high school class got an assignment to write letters to their future selves. Twenty years later, they receive them in the mail.

Upon opening them, the students are shocked to find that their envelopes contain old secrets that threaten to expose the truth about the tragic death of one of their classmates. And when one letter makes the beautiful and successful Miranda jump off a cliff to her death, the small community is rocked to its core.

Stunned by what has happened and armed with a clue of her own, Miranda's best-friend Audrey decides to track down her old classmates to get to the bottom of Miranda's death. And in doing so, she sets off a chain of events that could expose the truth not just about one untimely death, but two.

Time is moving fast when the classmates originally write letters to their future selves. They start the letters, go on an overnight class trip where one of them dies, and then finish the letters after they return from the trip. Audrey misses out on the trip and some other school when she’s unexpectedly sick. Now that her best friend has died, probably after reading what was written in her letter, she’s determined to find what happened on that trip to cause not only the death of a classmate back then, but creating a lingering conflict to cause Miranda’s death when the letters are delivered.

Entanglements, young love, divorce, affairs—how much of it is part of life, and could some of it have precipitated a murder? Audrey has usually kept to herself and raising her brother, but now she’s on a mission to discover which of her former classmates is hiding something that could have led to her best friend’s death.

While the ending of the book gave it an extra star to bring it to 4 out of 5, the middle got somewhat confusing with multiple character dramas and potential plot lines. The story was told from multiple viewpoints to tell of Audrey’s investigation compared to flashbacks in the content of other student’s letters and memories of the fateful school trip. This entangling mystery could be recommended for those who like school stories, murder mysteries, and complicated relationships.

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Becki Bayley loves reading, writing, and having fun with her family and friends. Check out her blog at SweetlyBSquared.com.

GIVEAWAY:

One of my lucky readers will win a copy of Dear Future Me!

Enter via the widget below. Giveaway will end on Thursday, June 12th, at 11:59pm ET, and winner will be notified the next day via email, and must respond within 24 hours, or an alternate winner will be chosen.

U.S. residents only, please.

Good luck!

Dear Future Me, by Deborah O'Connor