And Don't Look Back

By: Rebecca Barrow

Narrated by: Jade Wheeler, Kimberly Woods

Length: 9 hrs and 31 mins

Publisher's summary

After her mother’s death, a teen pieces together the truth of her family’s past and what her mom was hiding from in this thriller that’s perfect for fans of Courtney Summers and Tiffany D. Jackson.

Harlow Ford has spent her entire life running, caught in her mother’s wake as they flit from town to town, hiding from a presence that Harlow isn’t even sure is real. In each new place, Harlow takes on a new name and personality, and each time they run, she leaves another piece of herself behind.

When Harlow and her mom set off on yet another 3 a.m. escape, they are involved in a car accident that leaves Harlow’s mother fatally wounded. Before she dies, she tells Harlow two things: where to find the key to a safety deposit box and to never stop running. In the box, Harlow finds thirty grand in cash, life insurance documents, and several fake IDs for both herself and her mom—an on-the-run essentials kit. But Harlow also finds a photograph of her mom as a teenager with two other girls, the deed to a house in a town she’s never heard of, and a handful of newspaper clippings discussing the disappearance of a woman named Eve Kennedy, Harlow’s grandmother…relics of a part of Harlow’s life she never knew existed.

With these tantalizing clues about her mother’s secrets and the power to choose her own future for the first time, Harlow realizes she has two choices: keep fleeing her mom’s ghosts or face down the nebulous threat that’s been hanging over her for her entire life.

©2023 Rebecca Barrow (P)2023 Simon & Schuster Audio

Well written (spoilers below)

3.5 STARS

Harlow and her mother are on the run, never staying in one place very long. From what they are running, Harlow’s mom Cora won’t tell. When her mom dies, she leaves behind a safe deposit box that gives Harlow more questions than answers.

Rebecca Barrow does a fine job word-building and creating suspense, though unfortunately the payoff to the intrigue often falls flat. Many of Barrow’s twists surprised me.

AND DON’T LOOK BACK is a suspenseful, yet slow moving mystery. I’m always disappointed when writers fail at researching things like bank protocols (access to a deceased person account w/o a death certificate), medical aspects (like the ability of a patient bleeding from her mouth to communicate meaningfully) etc.

I look forward to Barrow’s next book.








SPOILERS BELOW









Eve, Cora’s missing mother was actually an abusive nightmare whom Cora and her 2 sisters “accidentally” killed. The reason, Harlow was actually Eve’s daughter, the sisters’ half-sister. Cora took Harlow away to avoid the secret coming out. She paid a shady neighbor to fix a phony birth certificate, naming Cora as the mom. Cora was running because she owed this guy $10,000 although she had $15,000 in a safe deposit box. This made zero sense to me. Maybe if the amount owed was $100k or a million dollars, but $10k that she actually had is silly. If Cora had been diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic or something similar, I’d get it, but Cora ruined Harlow’s life for money she had? That was my reason for rounding down.