Review: The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer

The Unbecoming of Mara Dyer (Mara Dyer #1) by Michelle Hodkin
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Mara Dyer doesn’t think life can get any stranger than waking up in a hospital with no memory of how she got there. It can.

She believes there must be more to the accident she can’t remember that killed her friends and left her mysteriously unharmed. There is. 

She doesn’t believe that after everything she’s been through, she can fall in love. She’s wrong.

♥♥♥

Let me just preface this by saying that I really need to read book descriptions more closely and look at the genre of a book before I start, because I was under the impression that this was a contemporary romance type novel with mysteries and murder. That’s not to say I wasn’t completely drawn in, because I was and I devoured this book in one sitting.


The book follows Mara after an accident leaves three people dead including her best friend, Rachel, and boyfriend, Jude. Even though Mara was physically okay, she has symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder including no memory of anything surrounding the accident. To help her cope, the family moves from Rhode Island to Miami, Florida where Mara starts at a private school full of queen bees and bullies. With a few exceptions Mara doesn’t fit in and her fear that she might actually be crazy made it seem like no school I’d ever want to attend. Except of course for Noah. Noah comes off at first as the bad boy of the school that’s the use ‘em and lose ‘em type getting whatever he wants. As he proves himself to Mara though things are definitely not what they seem with him. Also some of his lines has me covering my mouth to tone down my laughter, I’d recommend not reading those parts in a hospital waiting room like I was.

As time goes by, Mara starts to recover her memories through dreams and waking hallucinations, but the  truth she starts to discover leads to more questions about what she is really capable of. There are several layers of mystery in this book outside of just what Mara discoveries about herself, including a big one that furthers her connection with Noah. There was one mystery pertaining to a trial her father handles that I’m not sure though if it’s that there wasn’t enough of it to really develop an interest for me to care or there was too much of it included that it took away from the overall story.

The final twists and turns for this book left me questioning most of what we seemed to have learned over the book and I can’t wait to start The Evolution of Mara Dyer, which was just recently released.