My Ramblings on Wanted! by Caroline B. Cooney

Wanted!
By: Caroline B. Cooney
Release Date: Jan 22, 2013 (re-release)
Book Provided By: NetGalley
Author Website

Summary:

Alice Robie's father has been murdered, and the police have an e-mail message in which Alice confesses to the crime. When her own mother suspects her, Alice has no choice but to flee in the hope of proving her innocence. (from goodreads)

My Ramblings:

I don't know about anyone else, but my love for Cooney goes back to my middle school days when I devoured The Face on the Milk Carton and it's sequels and then slowly worked my way through the rest of Cooney's books. They were really my introduction to mystery novels and I could not have been more excited to pick up Wanted! and give it a shot. 

To be honest I wavered on how to rate this book and how to review it. It was very good. The characters and the story were great. The story follows a girl named Alice who finds herself at the middle of a murder investigation. She is framed for her own father's murder and goes on the run while she tries to figure out what happened and how to fix it. The thing that I loved most was that just as I thought I had it figured out, something would twist or turn and I'd be scratching my head again. I figured out who the real killer was only a few pages before Alice did, so that was really great. Also, the way that some of the oddities were explained in the end really tied up nicely. So some of the things that I was questioning as I read really made sense once the story wrapped up. 

What bugged me were some of the technical issues that were scattered throughout. There weren't a lot, but some were glaring and really threw me off. For instance, early in the book Alice needs to change her clothes and the sentence says: "She yanked off her jeans and let them lie on the floor, ripped off her t-shirt, which fell half on top of the jeans, kicked off her sneakers, which banged into the wall and fell back onto the carpet." Now there are a few things wrong with this section and I actually read it once, then read it again, then a few pages later turned BACK to it to make sure I had really read that, then I posted it on Facebook. Little things like that drive me bonkers, but when it came down to reviewing the book I needed to remember that this was an ARC. Chances are these little mistakes were fixed by the time the book went out to readers. So I can't really count it against the book (so I didn't). It's funny though how small things like that can cloud your entire view of an otherwise great book. 

All in all this was a great story. I would have liked a little more character development on Alice, but considering the timeline of the story I thought that Cooney did an excellent job showing the reader who Alice was and made me, at least, really care for this kid who was literally running for her life. I certainly wouldn't say no to seeing more of Alice some day in another book!