Gia Cribbs

Wow, this book is amazing! One of the most suspenseful YA thrillers/mysteries I’ve read this year and a really awesome debut! Not going to say too much because reading the unfolding mystery is the fun, but Sloane has been on the run and in witness protection for years, moving every few months before the bad guys close in, her only family, her US Marshal who protects her. Action-packed nail-biter with lots of twists and turns. Some trigger warnings that contain spoilers.

Trigger warnings: violence, murder, Stockholm syndrome, kidnapping, sexual advances by kidnapper towards victim

Please excuse typos/name misspellings. Entered on screen reader.… (mere)

The Disappearance of Sloane Sullivan is about a girl who six years before witnessed a murder that she can't remember, putting her family in the Witness Security Program. Since then, she has been on the run with her WITSEC agent, Mark, after her mother died in a car crash and her father committed suicide. Sloane Sullivan is taking on her 18th new identity, but it is to be her last since there has been a confession to the murder that she witnessed, so in nine more weeks, she will leave WITSEC, go to college, and be on her own. Mark has taught her to survive in any situation until Sloane enrolls in her new school and finds that one of the students in her class is her old friend Jason Thomas who lived next door to her in her old neighborhood. Will he recognize Sloane even though she is going by a new name and has changed her appearance? She hopes not because that would mean another move and another new identity.
The end of this book is excellent, but prior to that, there are so many things that distract the reader from the story. There are several detailed flashbacks to places Sloane and Mark lived and people they met in the last six years that slow the story down considerably, and there are so many details that require suspension of disbelief. Also, the book tries to be both the story of teenage angst and adolescence as well as a cunning mystery, but never really settles on one or the other. However, the story is interesting and a couple of clever twists at the end make it worth the read.… (mere)

One of the most clever books I’ve read all year, and I don’t see author Gia Cribbs disappearing from the writing scene as a result, for an extremely long time (no WITSEC for her!). I chose this as my second book during a recent ‘readathon’ (I think I’d been subconsciously waiting for some excuse to be able to just lay there and read it without being bothered), and it really was the perfect choice for that.
The premise is entirely fresh, especially for a YA thriller, and I couldn’t wait to dig into this story about Sloane Sullivan (assumed new name and identity), who is just now starting at a brand new school in a small town in North Carolina. Sloane is almost 18 and this should be her last few months in the WITSEC (witness protection program), after spending just about 6 years under 19 assumed identities, before she can finally break free and go and live a ‘normal’ life and go to college. She lives with a Marshal under the witness protection program, Mark, who has pretended to be every sort of relative over the years to protect her while they have moved place to place on the run while in the WITSEC program: father, brother, uncle, and he is loyal to a fault, teaching her how to protect herself and how to remain anonymous.
Now that Sloane has found a new school, she is determined for it to be the last stop before freedom, but her usual plan to fade into the background so that no one notices her, goes awry almost as soon as she enters the building on the first day, when she realizes she has bumped into an old friend, the boy and best friend she dearly loved, the one she left behind many years ago. AND suddenly everyone wants to be her friend. But she can’t afford to start over this close to getting out of WITSEC, and keeps this from Mark, and hopes that Jason doesn’t recognize her.
So that’s the basic premise in my words. From there on out, and literally from the first page onwards, this book was nothing but engaging. Sloane still hasn’t pieced together everything that happened on the night that the crime that sent her and her family into witness protection, and her memories have been repressed for the longest time, so as they start to come out, she gradually realizes the danger of the memories of the past.
Losing her father and mother are integral pieces of her character; Mark has had to replace those figures in her life, and understanding the facets of Sloane’s personality and how they relate to the loss and detachment she’s had to endure as part of the program is quite heart-wrenching. All the time she is around her new friends and her long-lost best friend, it’s incredibly hard for her to assimilate those new people into new roles, and learn how to trust again, at the same time as hiding so much from them still. Author Gia Cribbs has done a fantastic job of writing these complexities of how Sloane would react in situations that would make her feel awkward, and actually how her past would give her the hallmarks of PTSD. Also, the way in which she relies on Mark is a very interesting relationship too. Cribbs has mastered all the depths of communication (particularly the young people in the book) and different relationships of her characters to make so much of this book work and it’s really remarkable.
Without going into the plot points, ‘Disappearance of Sloane Sullivan’ is flawless, as far as I could tell, in terms of story flow, and the flashbacks to the past, especially when revealing Sloane suddenly remembering pieces of the organized crime (murder) she witnessed, and they are seamlessly written in.
All the twists and turns that come in the novel kept me reading for more and more, right down to the way the other teenagers’ actions are unknowingly affecting Sloane’s grand plans and future. Plus the characters and the pop culture (cue the 80’s!) are so fun! And the penultimate twists at the end are just brilliant.
I’m so glad this book didn’t disappear into oblivion, and it didn’t just get seen by Gia’s daughters (as she mentions in her acknowledgements in the back); this, and every book that I hope Gia has up her sleeve, deserves to be read, and on bookcases everywhere. Especially mine.… (mere)

Now to be fair, the first thing you need to know is that I LOVE books where the main character is in a witness protection program. I’ve read lots of them and I’ve at least liked them all.
I devoured this book in one day and I know that it will fly off the shelf in my classroom, if it even makes it to the shelf after I book-talk it.
First of all, Sasha aka Sloane is feisty and fun and tough and very likeable. The only problem is that I don’t have a consistent picture in my head of how she looks.
Then there’s the two significant men in her life, Jason and Marc. Can’t even BEGIN to say enough about those two. I imagine both of them as being gorgeous but in separate ways.
I also loved that when I thought the book was winding down it really wasn’t; lots of twists and turns kept me guessing til the end. And lastly, in spite of what she says at the end about disappearing, I prefer to believe she’ll make that phone call.… (mere)