“New girl, new school, new home, new life – everything about Holly is new. That's the point of witness protection; nobody knows the truth. But one wrong move will put her whole family in danger..."
This is a great premise for a book and I somewhat naively thought it was going to be set in the States as you don't really hear much about witness protection over here but how wrong I was. It is set in a typical English village along with very typical English attitudes to strangers. Holly and her family move into a house she doesn't like and she has to start a school that she knows she won't like. It won't be the same as her old life where she had cool friends and a cool boyfriend.
Holly is a very complex character as she tries to battle her past identity, Louise, with her new one. She tries to think how Holly would act instead of being herself and she falls in with the kind of crowd she wouldn't have looked at twice in her past life. I love the way Laura Jarratt keeps the suspense of what happened to Laura throughout the book, just drip feeding us when she has a nightmare or something reminds her of what happened. I enjoyed reading it this way round as it made you want to see what happened to Louise and you don't really find out the whole story until right near the end.
This book makes you think how you would react if you were in witness protection. You are cut off from everyone you know and love and most of the time you cannot even say goodbye. Imagine not being able to have a facebook or twitter account and not being able to look at your old ones as someone may be watching you trying to find out where you are. Imagine being a teenager going through this and you get exactly what Holly goes through. This book is really well written and the characters are easy to like so much so that you race to the end to find out what happens. I won't give anything away as the journey on getting to the end has to be savoured and not rushed.