What.

When Kelsey’s identical twin sister Michelle (hey, that’s my name!) dies in a car accident, she struggles to find a way to deal with it. Michelle’s boyfriend, Peter, has been fighting in Afghanistan completely unaware of her death. Kelsey wants to tell him, but when she finally gets in touch with him on Skype, he thinks she’s Michelle, and before she knows it, Kelsey is pretending to be her dead twin. Lara Avery’s A Million Miles Away is a story of both love and loss, and how not to handle them.

I was so excited to receive this book from Netgalley. The description on the site really drew me in and I got started on it right away even though I was already in the middle of another book. I read it in just one night, which is usually a sign of a book I really like, but ultimately, A Million Miles Away did not impress me.

Michelle was only a living character for a small part in the beginning of the story. She was a great student, dreamy and artistic, and also… a slut? That word was never actually used, but it was definitely implied (and I’m not sure it was intentional). She’d had so many boys around that her family had no idea what was going on. Her parents didn’t even know they needed to tell her boyfriend Peter about her death.

Kelsey, the exact opposite of her twin in every way (of course), had been introduced to Peter but didn’t think of him until weeks after Michelle’s death. During their first Skype call, he’s so happy to see “Michelle” that Kelsey doesn’t have the heart to tell him about the car accident, but vows to tell him next time. And so goes the story: Kelsey pretends to be her twin, promises herself she’ll tell the truth, keeps pretending, promises to tell the truth... 

I felt sorry for Kelsey and I understand that pretending to be Michelle gave her comfort, but she took it so far that it was hard to like her.

The entire plot was extremely predictable. Knowing from the description that Michelle was going to die, I also knew how everything was going to turn out as soon as Peter mistook Kelsey for Michelle when they met. I feel like with such a unique situation, it would have been easy for Avery to branch off of the cookie-cutter boy-meets-girl path, but she chose not to, and the book suffers for it.

***I received a copy of A Million Miles Away from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review***