Cryer's Cross

I love to go to the Young Adult section for great finds.  It seems like sometimes the adult books are written for the benefit of the author.  The young adult authors know that their audience has a shorter attention span so they better have a great hook and get them involved quickly.

Cryer's Cross by Lisa McMann is a story centered around Kendall, a senior who has OCD.  The town of Cryer's Cross, Montana is a mere 212 residents strong, and as the books opens, one of them is missing.  A new family moves into town and the oldest boy falls under suspicion, but nothing comes of it and soon the search for the missing freshman girl ends and a new school year begins. 

Since it is a small town, the high school students are in one room for the day.  Kendall's OCD requires her to be the first in the room to place the desks, markers, trash can and curtains properly.  Soon after school starts, Nico, Kendall's best friend and boyfriend (though she doesn't really feel as strongly for him as he does her) starts to act strangely.  When Nico disappears the town again forms search parties without avail.  The sheriff requires all children under 18 pair up and never travel alone.  Kendall gets paired with the new boy, Jacian. 

The first 190 pages of this 232 pages of this book deal with Kendall's character development and how she's torn between her feelings for the new guy and her problem with not feeling loyal to Nico. 
Honestly at chapter 23 it felt like the author thought, "Crap, I forgot about the missing kids, I better come up with something quick".  From here, the book just got weird.  When you look at the description of the book, the ending really came out of nowhere.
The book jacket's description ends with this:

        Something's not right in Cryer's Corner - and Kendall's about to find out how far the townspeople    will go to keep their secrets buried.

I was really disappointed with this book...the problem I had was it was just false advertisement.  They should have described the book like this:

Kendall is a high schooler in a small town.  She has OCD that seems to rule her life and now she seem to have gotten herself caught in a love triangle between her childhood sweetheart and the new bad boy in town.  And oh, by the way,  two kids are missing, one of them is her current boyfriend.

Very rarely do I finish a book and say to myself, "well that was a waste of time"  I'm afraid that's exactly what I said when I finished this one.

I give this 0 out of 5 stars