The Girl Who Stayed by Tanya Anne Crosby is a dramatic, and mesmerizing Southern story that grabs your heart strings and holds you in awe of a haunting and traumatic story of Zoe Rutherford and her sister's tragic past. Taking place on Sullivan's Island. THE GIRL WHO STAYED is Book 2, Book 1: The Things We Leave Behind".
Well defined plot with charming and enduring characters. A gut- wrenching tale of tragedy, suspense, realistic, and moving forward. Very emotional, page turning, powerful and compelling. A must read! Well done, Tanya Anne Crosby!!
#TheGirlWhoStayed, #TanyaAnneCrosby

"I voluntarily received a complimentary copy, however, these are my honest opinions. I was in no way required nor compensated to write a review."

Rating: 4.5
Heat rating: Sweet
Reviewer: AprilR ( )

The Girl Who Stayed by Tanya Anne Crosby is a leisurely-paced emotional journey of healing.

Haunted by her younger sister’s still unsolved disappearance thirty years earlier, Zoe Rutherford left home at eighteen and never looked back. Now thirty-nine years old and finally free of an eight year abusive relationship, she returns to Sullivan’s Island to fix up the family home then put it up for sale. Unprepared for the onslaught of memories, Zoe cannot stop thinking about her childhood and the devastating loss of her eight year old sister Hannah.

Those long events shaped Zoe’s entire life and she has not been able to escape its lingering effects. Her childhood was far from idyllic and in the aftermath of Hannah’s disappearance, Zoe took the brunt of the blame. Her relationship with her father deteriorated after an unfounded accusation that Zoe was responsible for Hannah’s disappearance and she suffered both emotional and physical abuse in the years before leaving home. Traumatized by both the accusation and abuse, Zoe continues to remain stuck in the past.

Zoe is a desperately unhappy and tormented character. She is standoffish, emotionally distant and fiercely independent. Although professionally successful, she has low self-worth and she is full of self-loathing. Zoe is unsure if her memories are accurate and she is confused by her impressions of those long ago events. Despite her close relationship with her sister, she was also extremely jealous of Hannah and she cannot help but obsess over her bewildering feelings about her sister and her unsolved disappearance. In the midst of her attempts to come to terms with her unhappy childhood, Zoe is also striving to understand how she allowed herself become trapped in an abusive relationship for so long.

Zoe’s memories of the past are revealed through a series of flashbacks as she reminisces about key events from her childhood. Viewing these memories as an adult provides her with a different perspective of her parents’ reactions. With this new understanding, Zoe recognizes how profoundly her dysfunctional childhood motivated her decisions and choices once she reached adulthood. Hoping to break this destructive pattern, she begins making more of a concerted effort to repair her fractured relationship with her brother and his family. Zoe tries to be less distrustful of the new people in her life but will opening herself to new friendships lead her into danger?

With an eclectic cast of characters and a haunting yet realistic storyline, The Girl Who Stayed by Tanya Anne Crosby is a captivating novel of new beginnings. Beautifully rendered and quite atmospheric, this poignant yet ultimately uplifting story will stay with readers long after the last page is turned. ( )

I received an ARC of this book from The Story Plant in exchange for an honest review.

I remember being excited when I saw the description for this book in my emails with Story Plant. It sounded like a good combination of a thriller and women’s fiction, which would soften a few of the edges that I’ve come to expect in thrillers. (For one, the body count would likely be lower.) A story about a woman coming back to her childhood home, facing the demons of her past, and getting more out of the experience than she expected. Solid premise.

And for the most part, the book delivered. …For the most part.

Zoe Rutherford is a woman with issues, and she’d likely be the first to agree with you. Her sister disappeared as a child, her father was abusive, and her mother turtled up into her own personal shell, unable to figure out how to save her family. Her parents are gone now, and she needs to go back to the old home and prepare the house for sale. Zoe herself is coming out of an abusive relationship (in many ways, this trip is her first action of leaving him) and her brother is caught up in his own life, the two having drifted too far from each other since their childhood to be close enough for support.

Needless to say, all the pros and cons of coming back to your old home show their face. Names she remembers. People she once knew. Places with too many memories. Mysteries she never managed to solve. You know, the usual. And as with so many things, nothing is quite as clear-cut as she remembered.

There isn’t a great deal that’s really surprising about this novel. Zoe suffers from Plot Syndrome: everything that happens to her would be fixed if she ever said anything to anyone, but of course the plot can’t keep going if she doesn’t stay silent and keep causing problems. I don’t blame the author or the character for this; that’s how plots run. What I have trouble with is when there’s not much else going for the character for us to root for. In romantic comedies, we put up with the shenanigans because we love the main character and/or their romantic interest and we want to see them finally come through the trials and tribulations and get their happily ever after. I don’t have that with Zoe. Her character is built on running away from anything and anyone she can, so we never see her with much of a relationship with anyone, aside from her missing/dead/something sister.

A character cannot exist in a vacuum, and though there are plenty of people around Zoe doing things, she lives in a vacuum, and that makes growing attached to her difficult. When we finally do see her make a connection…well, I won’t give any spoilers. But by the end, it gives you a “well that figures” sort of reaction.

Some word choices and trope choices in the books frustrated me. In the first 100 pages or so, Zoe is “accosted” by memories something like 4-6 times. First time is good, if it’s a particularly strong and/or traumatic memory. Second time it starts sounding redundant. After that, I’m looking for a thesaurus. Add in the trope of her scar/battle wound from the idiot ex-partner, and she’s starting to sound like Harry Potter. (Also, I didn’t get a clear idea of how long ago the scar incident happened. Some times it sounded like an old scar which could have inspired phantom pains, other times it was still healing and fresh…and thus not a scar yet. I don’t know.)

The ending felt like it was intended to give us all a nice sense of completion and understanding…but the way it was phrased and presented left me confused. I’m still not sure what really happened, nor who did it, and I’m even more confused about Zoe’s involvement than I was at the start. Not optimal for a book which centers around that case. (IN THE WOODS did this as well, though it was tempered by the fact that they never truly made an effort to clear up the cold case, where GIRL WHO STAYED does.)

By a third of the way through the book or so, Crosby hits her stride and the book flows nicely. The setting is clear and the characters multi-dimensional, and the book never plodded. The tempo stayed consistent, which was a saving grace of a sometimes baffling and/or frustrating plot. It’s a good beach book: something to take with you and just read for the sake of reading. I’d just hoped for a little bit more than that.

Rating: *** (Worth a Look)

THE GIRL WHO STAYED hits shelves April 19th, 2016. ( )

The Girl Who Stayed is billed as a mystery/thriller, but trust me when I say that it's so much deeper than that. This is the story of Zoe Rutherford's return to her childhood home of Sullivan's Island. A place of memories, most of them unpleasant. What begins as a quick trip to clean and fix up her childhood home, quickly turns into an introspective look at Zoe's life. Be warned, there are a plethora of emotions here, with childhood and adult abuse mixed in. This isn't the easiest story to read, but it was definitely more intriguing, than I expected it to be.

Zoe's head is a tough place to be. She's a prickly, and initially rather unlovable character. There's a wall miles tall between her and everyone else, set in place to protect her from more hurt. The fact that she obsesses over the same things, in an endless loop, makes for a tough read at times. As her abuse at the hands of both her father, and her recent ex-boyfriend started to come to the surface, I began to understand her more. It takes a lot of guts to finally walk away from something so damaging. Zoe ended up being stronger than I expected her to be, and I slowly grew to appreciate her for that. She may have been a bit broken, but only because she kept all the people who could have helped at arms length.

The mystery part of this is two-fold. One the one hand, Zoe has never let go of the unsolved disappearance of her younger sister Hannah. Her childhood was broken enough as it was, but Hannah's possible death has never let Zoe go. Crosby slowly unearths snippets of this traumatic event, bringing the reader further and further into Zoe's mind. When the second part of the mystery is presented, which I won't spoil for you, it actually fits in quite well. While I was pretty committed to this story for most of the book, the ending was what really brought it all home.

This wasn't a perfect story. It dragged at times, and Zoe isn't a character that everyone is going to love. However The Girl Who Stayed pleasantly surprised me. It ended up being much deeper than I expected it to be, and well-written at that. If you're in the market for a mystery/thriller that has a contemporary feel to it, this fits that bill. It's a worthwhile way to spend a few hours. ( )

Zoe Rutherford has come home to Sullivan's Island to deal with cleaning up and preparing for sale the house she and her brother grew up in, which they've rented out for years since their parents died. At least, that's the ostensible reason. In reality, the house and its problems give her a place to go and a problem to work on. Zoe has, after eight years, left her abusive boyfriend, Chris, and right at the moment has no idea what she's doing next.

The problem is there's an unsolved mystery on Sullivan's Island: What happened to her sister Hannah, who disappeared when she was eight and Zoe was ten? Neighbor kid and Hannah's friend Gabby Donovan claimed Zoe did it, pushing Hannah into the water where the currents would carry her away. Zoe knows she didn't, and there was never any evidence that she did, but no other culprit or cause was ever found. It's haunted her all the years since. It's why she's never returned to Sullivan's Island.

But she still wants to know what happened to her sister. And she returns to the news that two young women have disappeared without a trace in the last few months.

She starts to work on the house, repairing the damage done by years of tenants, and discovering that, with no tug rope to pull down the stairs, no one had ever bothered to go up into the attic.

The attic where, she and her brother Nick had stored their parents' and grandparents' things that they hadn't wanted to either toss or take.

Zoe spends the next weeks uncovering her past, reexamin There'sing her past, rethinking her relationship with her often hostile father and loving but withdrawn mother. There's the matter of rebuilding her relationship with Nick, just six when Hannah disappeared, and retracing her own steps the day of that disappearance. There's the problem of her grumpy but unexpectedly kind neighbor, Walter Donovan, Gabby's uncle. There's re-meeting the people she grew up among--some who remember Gabby's claims and, some of them, simply remember a younger Zoe, whom they grew up with, played with, went to school with.

Zoe keeps telling herself and others that she's not staying, even while re-experiencing both the bad and the good of small town life. And Chris remains an ongoing concern. Is he really going to let her just walk away?

And the whole time, she's looking for clues to her sister's disappearance.

It's an atmospheric and character-driven story, well worth some of your time. Recommended.

I received a free copy of this audiobook from Audible in exchange for an honest review. ( )