If You Can Hear This by Faith Gardner

I received this book for free from NetGalley to facilitate my review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

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The twisty, intricate mystery of I Killed Zoe Spanos meets the whip-smart sleuthing of A Good Girl's Guide to Murder in the newest novel from acclaimed author Faith Gardner, in which a club of misfits must come together to solve a dangerous mystery--and learn to lean on each other all the while.

Posey Spade loves asking questions--it's what's going to make her a fantastic journalist someday. And ever since her best friend and crush chose someone else, Posey's only focusing on her future career.

Unfortunately, she's just moved to the small town of Wild Pines--which doesn't provide a lot of groundbreaking journalism opportunities, only a scrappy AV Club full of self-proclaimed slackers . . . who Posey must somehow inspire to greatness.

She never thought that inspiration would come from the disappearance of the club's beloved sponsor and teacher, Ms. Moses. But as the days tick by with no answers, Posey and the AV Club take it upon themselves to dig into the mystery.

From a nepotism scandal to a local cult, Posey learns a lot about her new town. And as she spends more time with the AV Club, she also learns that friendship is just as necessary to solving a mystery as lots of questions. Good thing Posey has both.

In my quest to work through my NetGalley queue, I started reading If You Can Hear This by Faith Gardner. I have another book by Ms. Gardner in my NetGalley queue as well, so I was hoping that I would enjoy this book. I did – immensely.

What do you get when you mix a group of misfit kids who make up an audio/visual club, a missing teacher, and an apathetic town? You get If You Can Hear This. And believe me, this is a book you won’t want to miss.

Our main characters – Posey, Sal, Jeremiah, Athena, Yash, and Lexy make up the Wild Pines High School AV Club. They each have their own unique perspectives on life and what’s happening.

Posey is a girl who came to Wild Pines from San Francisco. She’s the new kid – she’s weird, quite a bit on the bossy side, and to be honest, obnoxious. I found myself wanting to reach through the screen and swat her upside the head, telling her to relax.

Sal is an enigmatic character, about whom we find out quite a bit. He’s mysterious and can seem suspicious at times, but he’s got a good heart and he cares about people.

Jeremiah isn’t seen as much but he’s an interesting character, what we do get to see of him.

Athena is the actress of the group but she’s got her own issues. I liked her quite a bit because she seemed more real than most of the other characters.

Yash is another character who is more or less in the background – we find out bits and pieces about him, but not much.

Lexy is seen fairly often in If You Can Hear This, but she’s another background character whom we don’t learn a lot about. I do wish we’d learned a bit more about her – especially considering she’s an activist at heart.

I loved the plot for this book. A teacher goes missing and her students set out to figure out what happened to her and where she went. They also want to raise awareness as it seems no one in authority wants to actually do anything about the missing teacher. It shows what students can do when they set their minds to it. It also shows some of the realities of people being on social media and what can come of social media use.

I gave this book a solid four stars because I thought it was a really good YA Mystery/Thriller. The start was a bit slow and it took a few days for me to really get fully into the book, but once it got going, it was awesome. I can’t wait to read the other book by Ms. Gardner that is in my queue.