REVIEW for Thicker than Water

Once again a HUGE thank you goes out to Harper Teen for sending me this e-book.

TITLE:                             Thicker than Water 

AUTHOR:                        Kelly Fiore

GENRE:                           YA - Social Issues

RATING:                         4 Stars

This book is realistic and does not shy away from the issue of drug addiction and enabling.

CeCe and Cy are close until Cy discovers drugs - the author does an excellent job of describing the hell of drug addiction, but with a twist - the focus is almost entirely on the family members and not the addict.

The telling of this story felt real and raw - it could happen to any of us without warning. The author focuses on a regular family who experiences unimaginable grief, which they do not process or deal with. The decline in all of the members of the family are vividly depicted, although CeCe is at the center of it all.

While this book was excellent, there were a few things that bugged me. 

Firstly - CeCe was not someone I felt any type of pity for. She was supposedly "smart" but yet, in many ways, she was the dumbest of them all. She never spoke up about anything, was extremely easy to manipulate and for the most part, never seemed to have the brains to ask "should I do this or is this right?" - there are a few very flagrant examples of this in the story line. I am not sure if the author wanted us to feel this way, but I could not shake my intense dislike of this character. I am okay with reading books with characters I don't like, but it did not work as well for me here, for some reason.

Secondly, CeCe's father needed to be more fleshed out. As it stands, he was kind of a faceless gutless man with absolutely no clue and the biggest enabler in the story line. We needed more information on him.

Finally, not sure I am buying the whole Tucker/CeCe thing and I am not even sure it was needed here.

Having said ALL of this, I still could not put this book down. Its pacing and writing is excellent and the story, while sad and horrible, is extremely compelling and kept me reading to the very end.