MESSAGE NOT FOUND By Dante Medema

I received this book for free from Reviewer Purchase in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

Message Not Found by Dante Medema
Published by Quill Tree Books on 3/29/22
Genres: Contemporary, Mystery & Detective, Thrillers, Young Adult
Pages: 400
Format: Ebook
Source: Reviewer Purchase
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Bailey and Vanessa shared everything: laughter, secrets, and packets of Pop Rocks to ward off bad days. But that all changed the night Vanessa left Bailey’s, headed for home, and ended up swerving off a cliff nowhere near her house. Now Bailey, who thought she knew Vanessa better than anyone in the world, is left with a million unanswered questions, and the only person with answers is gone.

To help grieve her loss, Bailey creates a chat bot of Vanessa using years’ worth of their shared text messages and emails. The more data she uploads to the bot, the more it feels like she’s really talking to her best friend. That is, until the bot starts dropping hints that there was more going on with Vanessa than Bailey realized—a secret so big, it may have contributed to Vanessa’s death.

Sweet and Short Review

Bailey and Vanessa are best friends, but when Vanessa leaves Bailey’s house and swerves off a cliff Bailey’s world is changed. Bailey wants to know what happened that night especially because Vanessa was nowhere near her house when she died. Bailey makes a chat bot of Vanessa to help her grieve, her conversations with the chat Vanessa begins to drop hints that there was something big Vanessa was hiding and Bailey is determined to figure it out.

We get to see Bailey and Vanessa’s friendship through flashbacks and through the chats. I love the way this book was formatted and seeing the chats and google searches. Bailey is grieving so the best thing she can think to do is to continue talking to Vanessa as a chat bot. Bailey has to fix the bot and add everything about Vanessa that she can think of, so that she’ll get responses that sound like Vanessa. Bailey becomes consumed in talking to the chat bot because she thinks she’ll learn what Vanessa was up to that night. I liked seeing how Esther and Mason were there for Bailey and tried to help her with her grieving process. The way everything unraveled at the end was mind blowing, I was shocked when we learn about what was happening. The ending was great and I love how everything was wrapped up.

Message Not Found was a book that I just wanted to finish in one sitting but also wanted to savor. This book is heartfelt and I loved Bailey as a character. There’s so many layers to this book it just takes us on a rollercoaster ride of emotions but its one of the best books I’ve read so far in 2022!