Tegan was in the backseat when her two best friends were gunned down in front of her. Was it an argument over drugs? An ongoing feud? Or something more random? Tegan says she didn’t see who did it. Or know why. Nobody will believe her. Not the police; not her friends; not the families of the victims; and not even Kelly, her own sister. Is she afraid that the killer will come back? Or does she know more than she is saying? Shunned at school and feeling alone, Tegan must sort through her memories and try to decide what is real and what is imagined. And in the end she must decide whether she has the strength to stand up and do the right thing.
My Rating:
The dual POVs in She Said/She Saw are represented in quite an interesting manner. Kelley’s narration is presented in the form of a screenplay, and Tegan’s narration is presented in the typical novel format. These alternating perspectives also create a more complete picture of the crime and its effects on the community, and also paint Tegan as an unreliable narrator.
Tegan and Kelly weren’t the easiest characters to like. I sympathized with their situations, but the way that they treated one another was awful. I understand that siblings don’t always get along – after all, I do have a younger brother – but they were just so self-absorbed and that I wanted to reach into the book and force them to help each other.
The mystery aspect of the story was fairly disappointing. There were very few viable suspects since all of the supporting characters were rather one-dimensional and had no motives. Granted that also meant that I didn’t piece together who did it until the very end, when the characters sat down and pieced together what they saw and knew to determine the reasons why Tegan’s friends were murdered, but by that point I wasn’t invested enough to be surprised by the killer’s identity.
Overall, She Said/She Saw was merely an okay read. It had the potential to be an interesting story, but ultimately fell flat due to a combination of unlikeable characters and a lack of suspense.
