#Blog Tour #Book Review of He'll Be Waiting by Liz Alterman #Young Adult#Thriler @Xpresso Book Tours

Today I'm delighted to participate in the blog tour for He'll be Waiting, a new, gripping thriller by Liz Alterman.

He’ll Be Waiting
Liz Alterman
Publication date: April 6th 2021
Genres: Thriller, Young Adult

There are no safe spaces…

When Tess Porter agrees to pick up her boyfriend’s college pal at the airport on a snowy December night, she has no idea she’s about to embark on the most dangerous ride of her life. Two days later, the 17-year-old wakes up in a hospital with broken bones, and unable to remember how she got there. Her parents are acting strangely, and neither James, her boyfriend, nor her best friend Izzy has visited. As she struggles to physically recover, Tess wrestles with haunting questions: What happened? Will her memory ever return? and what if she’s better off not recalling any of it?

Goodreads / Amazon / Barnes & Noble / Indiebound

Author Bio:

Liz Alterman lives in New Jersey with her husband and three sons. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Parents, McSweeney’s, and other publications. He’ll Be Waiting is her first young adult novel. When she isn’t writing, she spends most days microwaving the same cup of coffee and looking up synonyms.

Website / Goodreads / Twitter / Instagram

My thoughts:

​What a ride!Liz Alterman's newest thriller He'll Be Waiting proved to be such a gripping, compelling read, I just had to finish it in one sitting and here I am writing this review five hours after I picked the book!

17-year-old Tess Porter wakes up in a hospital with broken bones, bruises all over her aching body, stitches on her head after a surgery and, for better or worse, no memory of the 'accident' that caused all of this. Her parents are there taking shifts looking after her, doctors, nurses, a psychologist- the only person who is missing is her boyfriend James. Tess remembers that James was supposed to come back home from his college a day early to spend it with her, but probe further and her mind draws a painful blank. When she does see him, his visits are hurried, full of apologies and half-memories. What exactly is going on? Why would people who love her or are supposed to make her well-being their highest priority would force her through this torture of trying to remember the events of that snowy day on her own, without help? Why not just tell her what happened?

This is about as much as I can tell you without spoiling the story. Pay attention- the clues are there all there. When it all slowly and gradually gets revealed, you'll see how well-thought-through this compelling plot is. Personally, I don't like it when crucial information comes out at the end and there's no way you could have guessed who the culprit is and what their motivation was. This isn't the case here. Everything is foreshadowed and developed later. 
The same can be said about the characters. When we first meet Tess, she is hurting, she's confused, she's focused on herself, but through her eyes we get to see the people who are most important to her and who are all somehow involved in this mystery. Part of the message of this book is that everything is interconnected and even the smallest of our actions can have unpredictable consequences. Unpredictable because we can't control other people, their feelings and their actions, but we can do our best to be there for people we love and pay real attention to them.

The book is very easy to read, it just grips you and compels you to keep turning pages until you solve Tessa's mystery and go through a rich mix of masterfully-portrayed emotions - grief, anxiety, anger, sadness, forgiveness. An extremely well-written YA thriller from the author I didn't know much about, but certainly  hope to read more in future.

Thank you to Giselle from Xpresso Book Tours, the publisher and the author for the review copy provided in exchange for an honest opinion.

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