He'll Be Waiting


Young Adult - Thriller
368 Pages
Reviewed on 03/19/2021
Buy on Amazon

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Author Biography

Liz Alterman lives in New Jersey with her husband and three sons.
Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Parents, McSweeney's, and other publications.

She spends most days microwaving the same cup of coffee and looking up synonyms.

    Book Review

Reviewed by Lucinda E Clarke for Readers' Favorite

When Tess wakes up in the hospital, she has no memory of how she got there or why she is in so much pain with so many broken bones. The police are waiting to talk to her, her parents are barely speaking to each other, and it appears her whole world has fallen apart. In He’ll Be Waiting, author Liz Alterman takes us into the reality of a seventeen-year-old who is trying to make sense of her universe imploding. Little by little, she begins to remember the events leading up to the trauma of the night she was expecting James, her boyfriend, to sneak home from college a day early to spend the night with her. A series of apparently unconnected events culminate in a terrifying situation from which there is no return.

Reading He’ll Be Waiting by Liz Alterman took me back to my teenage years, and the time when the world revolved around me, and it was almost impossible to observe anything from any other viewpoint. In the beginning, I sympathized with Tess, and I felt for her loss and her desperate attempts to remember and face her new reality. But I lost some of this as she blamed everyone else for the tragedy. By the end of the book, we learned that every character had a part to play in the disaster and a string of events, from way back in the past, meshed together to create the drama. The author brought the characters to life, the dialogue is very realistic, and the story moved at a comfortable pace. It held my attention, it flowed well and all the loose ends tied up. The book also opened the door to the inside of the modern teenager, but I wasn’t too sure at the amount of apologizing from her parents for not being the perfect adults and role models, when in fact Tess was also to blame to a lesser extent for the events of that night. A trauma for so many people was the culmination of a series of apparently unconnected events that led to a horrifying night that destroyed so many lives.

Betty

I loved this novel. The characters feel so real. It's got suspense and heart and I'd love to see it turned into a movie!