The Never List by Koethi Zan. ⭐️⭐️⭐️

The book begins telling the story of two girls called Sarah & Jennifer. The girls decide to make a never list, things that they would never do. Never go out without their phones being fully charged. Never get into a strangers car. Always have a tank full of petrol.  The list goes on. One night they go to a party and get into a cab that they have booked. This leads to them being imprisoned, raped and tortured in a basement for 3 years. Her best friend Jennifer goes upstairs and is never seen again.

We then join Sarah 10 years after she has escaped. She is living in an apartment in New York which she never leaves. She works from home and she has any shopping delivered. She suffers from panic attacks and is clearly still traumatised despite all her counselling. One day she gets a visit from the lead detective to let her know that the man who abducted and tortured her is up for parole. She decides that in order to keep the man who abducted her behind bars she needs to visit the girls who were in the cellar with her and convince them to help her to find clues to where Jennifer's body is in order to keep him behind bars which could be revealed in letters that he had been sending them from prison.


I was really looking forward to this book but I have to say that it did not keep me interested. I could have quite easily have put this book down and never have picked it up again. I did like the protagonist but found it quite hard to believe that a girl who had suffered such a traumatic experience and was suffering with panic attacks as a result would have ever put herself in the situations that she put herself in. I also thought that there was too many characters in the book. I had to sit and remind myself of who certain characters were.


The things that I did like about the book was, although the girls were tortured and raped the author manages to get this across without going into any detail whatsoever. I was appreciative of that because I really can't read about those things. The ending was a complete surprise for me. I had a couple of ideas in my head as to what was going to happen but I was completely wrong.