Review Detail

(Source: I received a digital copy of this book for free on a read-to-review basis. Thanks to HarperCollins UK Children’s books and Netgalley.)
This is book 2 in the ‘Unravelling’ series, and kicks of 4 months after the end of unravelling.
Janelle is now living in a dystopian America following the end of book 1, and learning to live without Ben.

There’s a new threat though – people keep disappearing. The missing person’s count is through the roof, even considering the circumstances.
Then Barclay turns up to ask Janelle for help. People are disappearing from more than Janelle’s earth, they’re disappearing from everywhere, and the IA are investigating these missing person’s cases as a possible human slave trade. Why is this Janelle’s problem? Because Ben is missing, and he’s also the main suspect in the kidnappings.
How can Janelle help? Is Ben really involved in this slave trade? And why does she only have 5 days to turn things around?


This was an okay sequel to Unravelling. I did like this better than the first, but I still found it quite difficult to really connect with the characters, and it still left me with too many questions.

I thought it a little odd that Barclay would ask Janelle for help, even considering that Ben was involved. Once again Janelle is made out to be some big hero, while I find it really difficult to view her that way at all.
I didn’t really feel that much for any of the characters in this one. There wasn’t much interaction between Ben and Janelle, so we didn’t even get Ben’s sweet flirting, and Barclay and Janelle were odd characters for me. There seemed to be some sort of sexual tension between Janelle and Barclay that was unexpected, and Ben seemed to be incapable of telling the difference between Janelle and one of her doppelgangers, which was pretty insulting for Janelle.

There were a couple of other doppelgangers appeared from the alternate universes, which was both good and bad; although it was good to see the similarities between the worlds, it also raised a lot of questions for me. At one point it was commented on that a man could go home, accidentally slipping through a portal, to return home to find that he had 2 sons rather than 3 daughters. If this is possible, then surely not everyone would have a doppelganger? If this blokes 3 daughters didn’t exist in a different reality then surely they wouldn’t have doppelgangers, and then if they had kids with someone who did have a doppelganger – what would happen in the alternate realities then? Too many questions for me.
Although there were fewer plot holes in this one, I think writing about alternate realities etc. is bound to cause certain plot holes purely because of the material you are dealing with.

This one was more action packed, and the pace was a bit quicker which I appreciated, but overall this was only okay for me. The storyline was just a little too difficult to swallow, and I just didn’t care that much for the characters. I also thought the timer-countdown thing was purely for show, loads of other books have time-dependent problems and they don’t feel the need to incessantly count-down the way these two books have.
Overall; another okay story about the problems of alternate realities.
6.5 out of 10.