The Girl Who Was Supposed to Die

The Girl Who Was Supposed to Die is a young adult thriller by April Henry, published in 2013. It opens with its narrator waking up in a cabin with no memory of her own identity.

The narrator comes to in a ransacked cabin with two men arguing nearby about whether she should be killed, and she hears one of them tell the other to take her out back and finish the job. She escapes with no memory of who she is, where she lives or why anybody would want her dead. The novel follows her attempts to establish her own identity while staying ahead of the people hunting her, and the small pieces of evidence she recovers along the way: a note, a stolen name, a warning about biological weapons and the growing suspicion that the people closest to her had been preparing for this for a long time.

Henry writes fast thrillers with short chapters for teenage readers, and this one is built on a narrator with no past to protect her, which means every decision has to be made from nothing.