Hey mersquad coven!

I’m back with a couple more blog tour posts. I do have to get back into doing other fun posts as well besides reviews, so someone remind me to get back into that. I don’t know which posts I’ll do weekly, but I’ll figure that out. Maybe the Sunday Post. That was kind of fun!

Thanks so much to TBR and Beyond Tours for having me on this tour. Be sure to click on the banner above for the full tour schedule and to check out what other tours they have coming up!

College freshman Victoria Parker is trying to move on with her life after surviving sexual assault by her father and six months in foster care. She’s focusing on the positives–attending college, living on her own, repairing old relationships and making new ones, and getting involved with an abuse survivors activist group on campus. But everything’s thrown into disarray when a strange woman shows up, claiming to be Victoria’s aunt and asking Victoria to lie about what happened to her. With her father’s sentencing in a few months, she’s nervous about having to share the truth of what happened with a judge. She’s not even sure if she has the strength to go through with it. But when her fellow club members begin pressuring her to speak out, Victoria has to decide how to share her story while remaining true to herself.

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Disclaimer: I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own. Thank you to TBR & Beyond Tours, Netgalley, and Flux for this free copy. All quotes in this review are taken from the Advanced Reader Copy and may change in final publication.

This book is a sequel to the novel THE QUIET YOU CARRY, and although you don’t necessarily need to read the first to understand the second, it would give you more of an insight of what led to the events of this novel. So just a thought, and I do think that you should end up reading it if you get a chance, and if you are okay dealing with the same themes that we deal with here.

In this novel, we are with Victoria again, dealing with the aftermath of what was revealed towards the end of the first novel. As it says what happened in the synopsis, it isn’t technically a spoiler but it could be a spoiler if you plan on reading the first book first. Anyway, that kind of emotional and physical trauma is having an effect on her, and due to those incidents, she was also put into foster care for six months. It was for the best since it was not safe for her to be at home, but being uprooted from everything that you know and having to live with people that you aren’t sure truly love you after what happened to you can be very traumatic and overwhelming to deal with.

Despite those negative things, we see Victoria trying her hardest to focus on the positives in her life now that she’s in college, where she is living on her own and working on positive relationships in her life. She also got involved with a abuse survivors activist group, so she has that support from others that have gone through similar traumas as her, but they are also working to change the system so this doesn’t happen to anyone else. It feels very admirable of her to join an activist group like this when most people could want to not be involved in anything that would remind them of what happened. So I thought that was really brave of her as well.

But of course, there is still drama that Victoria has to deal with, and someone who is claiming to be related to her is telling her to lie to the judges and jury about what her father did to her. How dare this person make Victoria lie about everything she went through solely to save the man that put her through it? It’s terrible, and I’m not even Victoria! So you could imagine how Victoria is feeling, and I feel like she is justified in questioning whether this woman is even who she says she is.

If you are able to read a novel that deals with sexual abuse from a parent, and the aftermath, then I suggest this book. I understand that the content of this book could be hard for some people, and I don’t fault you at all if you decide not to read it for that reason. But if you are able to, I recommend reading both novels to fully get the experience of what Victoria went through and how she was able to maintain her identity.