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A good read but it takes time to get into it. Started off slow and hard to follow but soon picks up the pace and towards the end I had a feeling there might be a second book in the series. Would read this book again but would want a paperback version rather than digital book. I like to collect series to re-read.

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Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for allowing me to read and review this novel. I will not be giving a review on this novel due to I felt I could not give it my all. It just wasn't fitting into my mind enough to give a good or bad review.

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Thank you to NetGalley and to Skipstone Publishing for an honest review.

The concept of this book is fascinating—a girl skips to alternate universes where she made opposite choices. How cool is that? But besides the sci-fi aspect, this story is rooted in broken families and desires to make them whole again. Laney wants to renew her relationship with her father after a three year absence. But she discovers that his girlfriend is pregnant with her stepsister. Gibbs, the mother, has had several miscarriages, so Laney wants a relationship with Gibbs to protect her sister. Along the way, she escapes a potential attack from a young man who may have killed her 13-year-old self in another universe. As is usual with many YA books, the MC has a love interest, in this case a multiracial boy named Jagger who happens to be an expert wrestler and MMA fighter. He comes in handy as Laney confronts her murderer later on. The pacing is fast and the intrigue never wavers. This is a page-turner and will leave you wanting more answers. Luckily, Book Two will be released in a few months.

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I cannot accurately describe this plot, so I'll just say this book confusing and mind-bending. I did know going in that it was going to be a little confusing, but I did find it a little harder to follow than I thought.

That being said I did enjoy it, because it is a really unique premise for YA and I've never read anything like it. It's a nice refreshing idea.
I just didn't really like Laney. She was a little one-dimensional for me, which honestly does make sense because the plot is so layered that Laney's development probably got lost a little. I just wish she had a little more personality.

I do think this is an interesting read, and a good addition to the genre. I also really appreciated the trigger warnings at the beginning! More books should do that! Overall I did enjoy this, but it wasn't my favourite.

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Let me start this review by saying: this was by far the most confusing yet intriguing books I ever read.
I loved the concept of this book, being able to skip into alternate universes. I have never read a book with such a storyline, but I really loved it.
The book does deal with very heavy topics, but all these topics were handled very well.
Skipstone's writing style is very beautiful and easy to get through, which is why I flew through the book once I started.
I'll definitely check out Skipstone's first book and am very excited for the second book in this series!

Thank you to NetGalley and Skipstone Publishing for giving me the chance to read this amazing book.

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"Some Laneys Died" is a thrilling blend of science, mystery, and romance. The overall concept of the narrative was so unusual and thought-provoking, that it kept me reading. The longer I read, the more invested I became until I couldn’t stop reading to find out more. I craved an answer to the many questions that kept circulating in my head as Laney gradually gathered more information and tried to solve the mystery of the twin girls and their bodies in garbage bags in the woods. This was a mind-bending story that truly sparked my imagination and made me reflect on life and possibilities of "what if this were real?"

This is also an emotionally moving story that delves into the heart of sisterhood and the strength of that bond. As an older sister, I would purchase this book for my little sister. There is something to be said about this pure form of love and its power to hold us together even in our darkest, most traumatic moments. This is a well-written narrative that will carry you through a spectrum of emotions; I recommend it!

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Unfortunately wasn't for me. Didn't seem to get into the writing. Wanted to love it so much! Disappointed 😞

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DNF’d at 40%

When Laney was 13 years old, she saw her father having sex with someone who wasn’t her mother. Her father begged her not to tell anyone, but Laney immediately told her mother what she’d seen, which directly led to her parents breaking up. In the three years since that day Laney has become obsessed with the idea of alternate universes where different choices lead to vastly different outcomes. Now she’s 16, the lines between universes have started to blur, and Laney is finding that she’s able to skip between the timelines.

This is a really interesting concept for a book, and I was really hoping and expecting to like this one! I’m genuinely disappointed that I didn’t.

Laney’s obsession with timelines, universes, and what she saw three years ago, makes complete sense. She was traumatised and hasn’t been able to effectively deal with that. But her only other personality trait outside of this up to this point in the book is a tendency to jump to conclusions. What little actual presence she had, I didn’t really like. If Laney had been developed more, and had been given more personality outside of her trauma, then that would’ve improved this book tremendously.

I liked Laney’s mother a lot less than I liked Laney herself. One of the first things the reader is shown, as in this is the very first chapter, is a conversation that Laney and her mother have one year after the Incident™. Laney tells her mother that she’s been obsessing over what she could’ve done differently that day. Instead of reassuring her daughter that she did the right thing, or that Laney not saying anything that time would only have delayed the inevitable and that the affair would’ve eventually come to light anyway, she went into detail about how the many worlds theory works and reinforced Laney’s obsession with what-ifs. Which is the exact worst thing she could’ve done. In what else I read, her interactions with her daughter did not read like that of a healthy mother-daughter relationship. It rubbed me up the wrong way. To be fair, that might have been Skipstone’s intention, but I didn’t get the impression that it was.

This book has trigger warnings at the start, which is a very good thing! Every book should do this! I’m very glad that Skipstone included this, and I hope that doing this becomes industry standard very soon. However, not every potential trigger that crops up in this book is in that opening list. That there were any is better than nothing, but two major things that are in this book weren’t mentioned: incest and sexual assualt. Laney is assaulted and nearly raped by someone she trusted, and her stepbrother is constantly leering at her and trying to get her to sleep with him. Incest squicks me out, and I would’ve appreciated a warning for it. If either of these things were triggers for me, then reading these things could’ve been actively harmful, rather than just deeply uncomfortable.

Aside from these incidents, the rest of the book is also overly and unrealistically sexual. I freely admit that I’m asexual and my sexual experience is non-existent. I still doubt that many allosexual straight girls can say that, when they were 16, they decided to film each other masturbating at a sleepover and then freely shared those videos around. That scenario Just Doesn’t Happen.

All of this was making me want to stop reading, but I usually try to read at least half of arcs before DNF’ing. But then Laney said some casually racist shit and I could not bring myself to read the next page, so here we are.

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After reading and loving the author's first book, Someone To Kiss My Scars, I was looking forward to the release of her new novel. Brooke Skipstone once again manages to capture our attention as readers in a story that is complex, intriguing, suspenseful and exciting.

This book is particularly suitable for anyone who loves stories of love, excitement, suspense, emotions and thrills.
Some Laneys Died is a beautiful book that tells the very moving story of Laney and deals with several interesting themes such as romance, parallel universes, physics, resilience and other darker themes such as sexual assault, suicide, violence, family problems etc.

Laney is obsessed by a choice she would have made as a child, that of denouncing her father's infidelity and she feels guilty about her parents' divorce. She imagines other worlds in which she would have made a different choice than this one and learns to use this power to move between worlds. She soon realizes that our choices can have an impact on our present as well as our future. Laney is able to confront and reconnect with her past.

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It’s a first for everything I guess. This is the first time when I just don’t know how I feel about a book. Did I like it? Did I dislike it? I feel both at the same time. I did like the idea behind the story. Different universes for every choice we make? How crazy is that idea? If you really think about it you make hundreds thousands f choices every single day and every little choice you make creates another universe. Truky mind-bending.
But the story was confusing with Laney’s skipping and I actually didn’t like Laney that much. She just doesn’t feel like a 16 years old girl and that just made the story less real somehow...
I’m giving 3 stars becuase I’m glad I found this book and got the chance to read it but it didn’t blow mind.

Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for my copy.

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Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for a review copy in exchange for an honest review.

What a wild trip! From the beginning, this book hooked me and kept me reading quickly until the end. Laney made a choice she now regrets, causing her parents to divorce. She writes stories where she made different choices and finds some escape from her pain. But after a news story appears about the discovery of twin sister skeletons near where Laney caught her father having sex with his girlfriend, she begins to have visions of an alternate version of her. Then finds herself skipping away from her dying self in a truck wreck back to the version of herself who never got into the truck. During her journey to truth, she finds a boyfriend/lover/protector and a special person who's been trying to find her. And she faces an evil which has haunted her in several universes.

A great story—family drama and redemption, mind-bending science, and thriller action scenes. I'm definitely looking forward to Book Two later this year.

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Thank you to the author, publisher and NetGalley for providing an ARC of this book.

I don’t normally go for YA books but this one intrigued me. I loved the premise but some of the relationships didn’t feel realistic to me. Which sounds a bit crazy as I had no issue at all with the concept of skipping!

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*Thanks to the author for provide the ARC for a honest review*

In this book we have Laney, who caught his dad with another woman. Due to that event, her parents divorced and since then she's been obsessed in write her possible choices to make in the day-to-day.

I need to admit that I'm not familiar reading thriller books so at first it was hard to get into the story, also because of the amount of information that has. But while I was going through the story the book succeed in catch me and I wanted to read more about the multiverse.

The book contains topics like multi-verses, science and also has sensitive topics like rape and suicide.

In conclusion, although it's a little confusing first, after some pages it get more and more interesting the story.

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Thank you to NetGalley for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I found the idea of this book very, very interesting, and knew I would be requesting a NetGalley copy as soon as I read the synopsis.
The thriller aspect of the story was brilliant, it kept me hooked page after page as Laney takes us on her side-skipping adventure. This is the first book I've read that has combined thriller and multiverse writings into one, it worked really well and I look forward to reading more.

The reason this book hasn't received a 5 star rating is because the main character Laney was really infuriating sometimes. Like reaaally frustrating. She's extremely naive with a lot of things, and believes pretty much anything people tell her... but then again that could be said for most of the other characters too. It amazed me how quickly other characters jumped on board with various theories and ideas that are put to them here, there's not really any pushback to make it a bit of a challenge, everyone just agrees and then carries on... I'd expect a bit more questioning if I tried explaining to people that I'm bouncing between other universes, but that's just me I guess.

I think the author may have tried to add too much to this story, so there's times when scenes and conversations aren't given the details they deserve because we've now moved onto something else in the book.

I'll definitely be reading the second in this series when it comes out, I'm intrigued to see where the story goes from here.

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The book has an interesting concept and I enjoyed the parts of the book focused on ‘skipping’ but I could not get into the book. I did not like the writing style, the dialogue was weird and awkward between the characters and too much focus was on drama – especially between the adults in the book who made the main character look mature.

Although I liked when the character talked about alternative universes/choices and jumping between them, I did feel like in the second half of the book there was so much action and the main character was skipping a lot more and yet there was no explanation for it given, I was confused on how things were so easily falling into place.

1/5

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Actual rating: 2.5⭐

This captured my attention because of the cover and the seemingly interesting synopsis of the book. I love books with multiverse theme on it. I automatically add books with this theme on my tbr. So I was very happy to see this on the 'Read Now' section of netgalley and immediately got it.

Laney, a daughter of a physicist, writes down a lot of what-ifs in her life to somehow cope on her guilt and issues. This book has a sci-fi and mystery element on it as visions or memories of other Laney kept intruding on her life.

It could have been a good book if not of too many themes forcefully squeezed into this book. For a young adult book, it has a lot of uncomfortable or sensitive stuff on it. It made me disconnected on the story. Also, the 'skipping universe' thing is not believable to me. The characters are not consistent and did absurd things that doesn't make sense at all.

My main problem is Laney. She was not relatable at all.

This book should come with trigger/content warnings and needs a lot of it. I'm not sure if there were but since it's a mystery, I dove in blind. My bad.

It was a chaotic read for me. I guess it just didn't work for me.

***Thanks for NetGalley, the publisher and author for making this available for review.***

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Wow. I am still trying to catch my breath after finishing this one.

So first of all this took me a couple of chapters to get into it. Once it hooked me however, it did not let go.

I love this weird sciencey aspect to the thriller that makes me think. It’s a fun new twist on a genre I didn’t think was possible. It’s a very unique plot. Each choice laney makes or doesn’t make creates an alternate universe where the opposite happened. Add in some family drama, teen love, and a sadistic killer and you got yourself one heck of a book.

One of the things I’m most picky about when it comes to reading is the pacing. This may have taken me a min to get into but it was because of the sciencey aspect not because of the pacing. It didn’t feel like a slow burn. The pacing was quick and after a while it felt like every chapter was leaving me with more questions I was aching to get the answers to.

This was a whirlwind experience and I’m glad to have read this book. I can’t wait to read the second. This is definitely a must for any thriller aficionado’s shelf.

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Some Laneys Died is a twisty tale about alternative universes, mystery, family and the choices we make, and the guilt some of them might bring us. I thought the concept for the story was gripping so it felt like it had a lot of potential, even the title seemed promising. However, I have some mixed feelings about it.
The best word to describe my experience reading this book would be inconsistent. Sometimes I was completely mesmerized by the plot and how things were unraveling but other times I was a bit lost or just felt taken out of the story. Although I was rooting for them, for some moments some characters didn't make that much sense to me. Even though in some parts the story seemed to want to explain in great detail how the skipping worked, and in others it just glossed over the whole logical quantum physics things. And the same goes for the tone, I was very thrown off by it in ocassions. In my opinion, the book tried to do too many things. Anyways, I was still emerged in the story, I just think a lot of stuff could've been handled better.
It's a 2.5 star for me. I will say though that it's an interesting read.

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Some Laneys Died by Brooke Skipstone is a gripping young adult thriller of a girl named Delaney West (Laney) who sees her father cheating on her mother with another female. Her family fell apart and she is filled with guilt after that.

It talks about life and death, inbetween world's, alternate universes, sisterly bonds and finding the ultimate truth. I went into this book completely not knowing what it is about. So it was hard for me to figure out what was happening in the start.

But eventually the story catches it's grip, and we see the most thrilling and page turning story ever. She decides to meet her father and his girlfriend and sets on a journey to find out her lost sister.

Overall, the story is commendable. It's full of mystery, twists and turns. The narration by the author is beautiful. The story is captivating but somewhere in between I was lost, so I hope those minor changes are seen in the next book of this series.
__________

Thank You to the Publisher and NetGalley for this e-copy in exchange of a honest review.

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I have conflicting ideas on this book. If I were a teenager I would easily give it 4 stars. But as an adult I would give it 3. I found the story extremely compelling. Quantum physics, multiple universes, possible clones/ alternate self? Sounds great! The plot kept twisting and turning and I loved that. Laney has got a LOT going on in that brain. Where I have to take off my teen lens, is at the character development and dialogue. It was lacking. I didn’t feel connected in any way to any of the characters (which is the mark of an excellent book to me), but I felt compelled to finish because of the storyline. The dialogue just fell flat, and I often found myself saying “really?!” in response to the dialogue. I will have no qualms recommending this book to my upperclassmen students, as long as I give the warning of intense sexual assault scenes.

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