NetGalley ARC | The Anniversary

I received a free digital ARC from the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Rating ⭐⭐

The Anniversary focuses on Quinn and Jules, not friends but friendly, high school students. One night both of their lives change forever. Quinn is arrested for nearly killing someone and Jules survives an attack by a serial rapist/killer known as the May Day Killer who only strikes, as you might guess, on May 1st.

We follow their lives from that night in 1992 and see Quinn released from juvenile detention, while Jules is struggling with the trauma of her attack and the question of why she was spared when so many others were not. There's the additional trauma for Quinn of his mother's unsolved murder, which he is determined to solve.

The story meanders on for the next decade and we meet them again on each May 1st. Quinn and Jules are repeatedly brought together through various circumstances, until answers are finally revealed and killers are unmasked.

Okay, so I really loved the first two books I read by this author. The Night Shift was a very solid four stars for me and If Something Happens to Me was an easy five-star read.

This though? I kind of feel like two stars is generous. Instead of reading his new work (Parents Weekend was an atrocious one-star. I HATED it), maybe I should go back and read previous books becuase his new stuff is just not working for me.

With Parents Weekend, the whole plot and reasoning for anything was just absurd. Way too many characters, super convoluted, a complete mess. This one though, the characters simply were not compelling. I wasn't really drawn to Quinn or Jules, though I found Quinn's search for his mom's killer a much more engaging mystery than the May Day Killer.

I think one reason it was so hard to connect to either character was because we never really get to know them. Since the story is told through a series of May firsts, we miss out on the rest of the year. We get a kind of info-dump of what they were up to, but we only see them in relation to their individual traumas and struggles connected to May 1st - even when other major life events are occurring on any other day. We are only told about them afterward if they don't occur on a May 1st. This results in characters not being particularly fleshed out. And it's really hard to care about characters that you have no investment in.

I don't feel like this novel compares at all to the previous two I mentioned that I absolutely loved. I would definitely recommend either of those and pass on this one.