Using a motif - online (fake) identities - previously explored elsewhere, Last Girl Ghosted by Lisa Unger is a thriller exploring the dramatic power of trauma.
At the first sight, it´s what one may expect to happen once in a while, when daring to go out on the web looking to find a match. The first chapters are mostly about Birdie´s entanglement with Adam, a handsome and generous single expert in cyber security. But as she is ghosted a couple of months into the relationship and she cannot trace him back - the apartment where he cooked for her is in fact an AirBnB whose expenses apparently he ´forgot´ to pay - and a private investigator is getting in touch with her after other girls the same ´Adam´ met on the dating app Torch disappeared, she starts to suspect there is something different here.
The moment when the story switches from the online dating drama to a more serious traumatic experience revealing her own identity issue, is unexpected. How else though to write about ´ghosting´ without being repetitive ? In Last Girl Ghosted the weight of trauma is larger than the story itself therefore the disbalance I sensed between the thriller expectations and the emotional exploration.
There are also a couple of elements, especially towards the end of the story that are too sugary for my taste, but the fact that we are not aware that we are looking in our partners features of our parents - including psychologically abusive relationships - is largely relatable.
Last Girl Ghosted plays well some mind games but becomes overhelmingly emotional without compensating on the action front. Nevertheless, the book has a creative literary perspective that deserves the bookish attention of any thriller lover around the web and the libraries.
Rating: 3.5 stars
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