‘What the River Buries’ is Rocky Hirajeta’s first book. It is a YA crime novel told from the perspective of Natalie, a troubled seventeen-year-old who gets embroiled in a small-town conspiracy after she stumbles across a murder in progress during a late-night outing to her favorite park. What she sees drives her to investigate the crime on her own to uncover the darkest corners of her town at the risk of her grades, her relationships, and even her life.

I don’t read much YA, so it’s harder for me to comment on this one, but I’ll do my best. I was reading this to get some crime novels under my belt, and I think it did the trick well. The plot was pretty easy to follow through the twists and turns making this a quick, punchy read, a thriller without all the violence. The heavy suspense that followed Natalie throughout the course of her investigation, especially as she got closer and closer to the truth of the matter, was what really drove the story. I was always ready to follow deeper into the rabbit hole, from tough conversations at school, to the basement of a murderer who might come home at any moment. There was some striking imagery here and there that has stuck with me, and I would like to see even more of that theatrical side of Hirajeta’s style in future projects. Some powerful emotional moments rounded out the story with a satisfying conclusion. It’s an all round solid structure with a lot of suspense and action throughout.

My biggest issue with this book was that, most of the time, I wasn’t really sure why Natalie was doing what she was doing. Her motivation for uncovering the plot all on her own in parts one and two was unclear, and though her hand is forced in later parts of the book, I couldn’t fathom why she didn’t report the crime to the police earlier. It felt like a good opportunity for some character building, but I’m not sure Natalie herself really understood her own motivations. That’s alright for a character like this, she is a teenager after all, but I couldn’t help but feel like she ended up in a lot of unnecessary danger for no real reason. I think her inability to look within relates to the grief she feels over her deceased father, and the unresolved gap that his death has left in her life. At the beginning of the book, her life was slowly drifting out of control, and it seems like she just needed something to latch on to. After she becomes obsessed with unmasking the killer, she won’t let anything shake her off the trail, but I just wasn’t really sure why that was until the very end stages of the book. If this point could have been hammered home earlier, it would have been easier to understand her character and empathize with the (often incredibly poor) choices she made. It did get me thinking about her character on my own though, which I think works well for a YA novel to inspire some original thinking about character traits and motivation.

Natalie was a complicated protagonist with more faults than strengths, some of which are resolved well by the end, but I can’t really say I like her very much. I was hoping I would be cheering for her more by the end, but it was difficult to get over how she constantly lied to her friends and family in the first half of the book, her generally poor attitude toward anybody who tried to help her, and the simple fact that she didn’t think things through very well. The story beats themselves are great, but I found myself struggling to empathize with the protagonist for large portions of the book. Still well worth a read if you like YA or are looking for a suspenseful read by a new author.

Thank you for reading,

Benjamin Hawley