What Happened on Hicks Road by Hannah Jayne

What Happened on Hicks Road by Hannah Jayne is a YA thriller published by Sourcebooks Fire on August 29, 2023.

Publisher's summary:

Those eyes.  Wide.  Ice blue.  A swath of blond hair illuminated in headlights.  Then, blackness.

Thump!

"We hit something."

Lennox Oliver is loving her new life in California.  For the first time, she feels normal.  She has friends, and a maybe boyfriend and best of all no one knows the truth about her past and what happened to her mom.

But everything changes the night after a party when a drive on the supposedly haunted Hicks Road turns deadly and Lennox hits something…or someone.

Her friends say it was nothing, at worst, a deer in the road.  But Lennox can't shake the vision of the girl in the headlights: bloody hair, wide, terrified eyes, lips parted in a scream.  When she goes out to investigate, there's a slight dent in the car, but that's it: no body, no blood.

Lennox wants to go to the police—but how can she?  She shouldn't have been driving, and as her friends remind her, there's no evidence that she actually hit anything.  All Lennox wants to do is go back to her boring, normal life.  But when a note saying FIND ME is slipped through her window, she fears that there was a girl she hit on Hicks Road that night …or she's slipping deeper into the illness that took her mother.

Lennox is an unreliable narrator, which is a bit annoying, simply because I wasn't sure which direction the plot would take.  

The reader knows that one of two things must be true: Lennox hit a girl on Hicks Road, or she imagined it.  So, which is it?

Years before, Lennox's mother was committed to a mental institution due to acute schizophrenia.  Lennox worries that she is developing the disease.  The reader has no way of knowing whether Lennox is mentally ill or whether something else is going on.

I had a suspicion that grew as I read through the story.  Once I was in the second half of the book, I felt like I was probably right.  I still had doubts, however.  I won't say anything else.

The book ends very abruptly right after the reveal of the true situation.  Some readers have complained about the abrupt ending.  When I was in the process of purchasing the book, I read one review that mentioned the abrupt ending.  The review started to mention why it was okay, and I quit reading since I didn't want to know anything.

For this reason, I knew as I read the book that it would end very quickly after the plot resolution, so I was prepared for a fast ending.  I wasn't surprised or disappointed in that.

After I finished, I realized that the abrupt ending was like what Christopher Pike does in many of his teen books.  Pike's books tend to end very quickly after the plot resolution, so What Happened on Hicks Road is the same style of book.  While Hicks Road isn't a Pike book, it does have some similarity to Pike in several ways.  I was okay with the ending.

The book is a bit tedious at times, simply because Lennox is such an unreliable narrator.  As my suspicion about the true situation developed, I found Lennox's narration to be far less annoying.  I was pretty sure that I knew where the plot was going, and I began to spot the clues that had been there all along.  The book also has some intriguing misdirection.

In my opinion, the early part of the book is good, and the second half is very good.