Recommendation Tuesday: Don't Look Back by Jennifer L. Armentrout

Recommendation Tuesday started as a joke and is now an official thing. Basically, this is my way of making Tuesday a little more awesome. If you've got a book to recommend on this or any Tuesday, tweet me at @FullShelves and I'll help spread the word.

Today, Sandra is recommending a book that's straight-up fun, the always-entertaining Jennifer Armentrout's Don't Look Back. 

On its surface, Don't Look Back shouldn't be that gripping. The plot is not unique: murder, amnesia, uncertainty, danger and a dark shadow haunts the main character, Samantha Franco. But Jennifer Armentrout’s  addictive plotting make this mystery deepens into an unforeseen  denouement, an unravelling of a long-held secret.

Samantha’s memory is gone. She is an impaired witness to the murder of her best friend. She awakens alone near the woods bruised, bleeding and without a clue as to who she is or how she became battered.  Her ordeal left her with a blank where memories should be found. 

I shivered, wanting to be away from here . . . wherever that was.

The sleeves of my sweater were torn, revealing pale flesh covered in bruises and gashes. My legs started to shake as I swayed forward. I tried to remember how this had happened, but my head was empty - a black void where nothing existed. 

Her confusion and fear meld together as the story unfolds and strange notes begin appearing in her things, things that no one could have access to--no one but Samantha herself. "Don’t look back you won’t like what you find," and other admonitions appear with fearsome threatening regularity. 

With determination to seek out the truth, Samantha goes in search of her lost self. She discovers that she and her murdered friends took the stereotype of mean girls to a a finely honed and cutting level. These mean girls branched out to include mean boys all wrapped in a nasty clique that didn’t care who they demeaned as long as they came out on top. 

The new Samantha, the girl who’s now a blank slate (since this is an amnesia story after all), emerges as a person with a clear sense of values, one who will stand up against what she once stood up for as she pursues answers to her friend’s death, what secrets her past held, a new love that stands at her side and a truth that may break her heart.

The mantra “don’t look back you won’t like what you find” haunts her as she looks with horror on the person she once was and strives to discover what happened to her, who murdered her friend and why they were alone in the wilderness late at night.

I know Sarah has found this author's Lux series about aliens almost embarrassingly addictive, and I can see why. While Armentrout is light on the character development, her plotting is great, never letting up and full of twists and turns. I ordered Don't Look Back on an impulse, and blew through it in no time flat. It's definitely one to pick up if you want an easy, engaging read. 

Find it on Amazon | Goodreads