In Another Life

Gr 9 Up—Despite being adopted when she was just three years old, Chloe Holden has led a pretty good life—right up until last year. That's when her dad decided to have an affair with a woman who could be Chloe's older sister and her mom got cancer. Now she's been uprooted, from her home and friends in El Paso, to Joyful, Texas, just in time for her senior year. It's not easy to be the new kid your last year of school but when she meets Cash Colten she thinks, maybe, her luck is finally changing. Then Cash fesses up to the real reason he sought her out; he believes that she is the daughter of his foster parents, a daughter that was kidnapped and disappeared 15 years earlier. As the two start to dig deeper into her adoption, it becomes apparent that someone in Joyful is willing to kill to keep the secret. The story unravels at an even pace. The characters are all well-written and fully developed, from the main characters to the smallest of support roles. It is this attention to character detail that sets this apart from some other YA thrillers. The mystery itself, while compelling in nature, seems fairly obvious from the beginning and the story is more a matter of finding out the why and the how events occurred. The characterization really is what propels the story.