Book review: Disconnected by Lisa Cronkhite

Seventeen-year-old Milly has a huge problem on her hands.  She is being bullied by Amelia Norris. Day in and day out, Amelia torments Milly and even threatens to hurt her, but she can’t tell anyone—not a soul.  Milly’s reasoning—she does not want anyone to know where her tormentor lives.  They only share one thing in common.  Both co-exist as one in the same body. Milly is so disconnected from her past that she feels compelled to find out what truly happened to her when her parents were still alive.  After a mysterious fire, she and Grandpa George move into Aunt Rachel's Victorian home where Milly then begins to unravel puzzling clues to her family history. Through dreams and scattered memories, Milly journals her breaking story, trying to cope by putting the shattered pieces back together, all the while resisting with her inner demon.  Amelia is determined to cut Milly out of the real world—literally. Milly starts to wonder who her real family is after stumbling across Aunt Rachel’s notebook—having the intuitive sense that something terribly awful is missing.  All she had thought to be true now seems like one big lie.

Disconnected follows the trend that started showing up in YA a while ago of rather introspective books that are more about the main character and how his or her mind works with the mental illness they have than really have a plot.  In this way it’s kind of iffy, because the writing is unclear in a way that has nothing to do with Millie’s confusion over who she is and how Amelia is actually a part of her, not a separate person.  The writing is murky and doesn’t feel complete in the way that a rough draft would, not because it’s told from the point of view of someone whose mind isn’t “right.”

This book differs from others of its kind because it does attempt to have a plot outside of Millie’s mental illness, but it’s a little… bizarre.  It feels more like a soap opera than a YA book, but I suppose that that’s where the genre is sometimes heading, with its flare for dramatics and such.  I will give the author credit and say she manages to do some foreshadowing that isn’t ‘drop it right in your face’ obvious, though, so she at least tried to connect the plot throughout the book instead of having it dropped on us at the end.

I really have nothing else to say, though.  The book wasn’t necessarily BAD but most of it was unremarkable and didn’t stand out that much to me.  So an eh book.