Kate’s Review: “We Did Nothing Wrong”

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Book: “We Did Nothing Wrong” by Hannah Jayne

Publishing Info: Sourcebooks Fire, December 2024

Where Did I Get This Book: I received an ARC from the publisher.

Where You Can Get This Book: WorldCat.org | Amazon | Indiebound

Book Description: Lia thought of the dark night, of the broken street light.

Had Diana gone out to meet her? Had she been waiting for her, alone in the park? Or had someone been waiting for Diana?

Lia and Diana are the It girls of Empire Hill High. Their lives are perfect….until Diana disappears and the rumors start flying. Everyone thinks Diana is a runaway, including the police. Lia is secretly convinced it’s all a prank. Then she finds a crushed red rose tied with a candy-cane ribbon where Diana went missing. And next to it, a  YOU. It’s the same ribbon Lia’s received on gifts from a “secret admirer.” Did someone come for Diana that night? And will Lia be next?

Review: Thank you to Sourcebooks Fire for sending me an ARC of this novel!

It had admittedly been a little bit of a dry spell for YA thrillers before the past couple of weeks, but with “Heart-Shaped Lies” being spotlighted last week I broke that streak, and now I follow that up with “We Did Nothing Wrong” by Hannah Jayne. If the last YA thriller was a soapy murder mystery, this one is solidly missing person, a sub-genre I enjoy very much. So when I read the description for this one with a missing girl at its heart and a left behind best friend who is frantic (and feeling a little guilty), I was very eager to check it out. And it had some mixed results.

Firstly, however: the good. I will say that by the time we were getting to the last third of the book, the pace really picked up, the red herrings and reveals were flying, and I was quickly charging through because I was so interested in seeing how it was all going to shake out. I’d keep thinking “Diana has to be alive, right?” only for a few minutes later to think “No, Diana’s dead, that has to be it”, and then keep flip flopping as Lia keeps digging in and finding more clues. I liked that Lia was also what I would consider a ‘more realistic’ teen detective, as she has kind of been thrust into it out of desperation for Diana’s sake AND her own guilt about how their relationship had been as of late (namely, cheating with Diana’s boyfriend Eli), and therefore is more harried and chaotic as opposed to calculating and methodical. And finally, I also appreciated how Jayne tackled the role that law enforcement was playing in this story, as they go through the motions looking for Diana, but aren’t REALLY trying too hard, convinced that she’s a runaway and therefore not a priority. It’s a sadly common narrative in real life abduction cases sometimes, and having a story with a not necessarily malevolent investigative team, but certainly an inept and lazy one, was an interesting choice for this book to make, and it was one that worked for me.

But unfortunately, the pacing was a bit off in this book, with a lot of slow but not super engaging build up dominating for a little too long for me. I thought that the book was spinning its wheels for awhile, with a lot of it being Lia dealing with her guilt about her friendship with Diana growing distant, and her poor decision to sort of pursue Eli behind Diana’s back. We get some background throughout of their complicated relationship, one that certainly felt genuine (because as someone who DID have a very complicated relationship with one of my best gal pals in high school it was very relatable). But the ruminating and angsting on Lia’s part was a bit repetitive, and by the time we had finally gotten to the uptick in action and a very satisfying finale I felt that it was a little late getting there.

All in all “We Did Nothing Wrong” was pretty run of the mill. When it finally got going I was entertained, but I think we needed to get there sooner.

Rating 6: Once the pace picked up near the end I became invested, but it took a bit to get there.

Reader’s Advisory:

“We Did Nothing Wrong” isn’t on any Goodreads lists as of now, but it would fit in on the Goodreads shelf “Missing Girls Books”.