Girl from Nowhere

This book is a debut novel, which means there is a lot of room for author Tiffany Rosenhan to grow. Unfortunately, this first one did not hit the mark.
I love the idea of a thriller aimed at a YA audience. It seems like there are not enough of those, and there were some interesting concepts toward the end of the book. It was also a relatively fast read.
However, there were a number of problems. First, the book had a hard time striking the tone of thriller. The action could be messy and the pacing was off, making it less thrilling than it could have been. The YA teen romance elements often did not mesh well with the intrigue, spy adventuring.
The characterization was also lacking. The main character's personality seemed to be mainly that she has lived many places. She frequently corrected people and talked excessively about herself, which would be fine if that was a character point. However, everyone around her acted as if this was charming rather than frustrating in the way it when people act like this. Unfortunately, it felt like the book was unaware of the character's problems and people around her treated her like she was absolutely the best person. The character also was written as if someone as well educated and traveled as her would have no idea about the most basic American concepts. For example, a scene where she doesn't understand eating hamburgers even though those are wildly available throughout Europe as well.
The main problem though is that this book tackles some heavy topics, terrorism, gun usage, and PTSD specifically. Both of them were not handled with the care necessary. It is challenging to write an effective plot about international terrorism, however, this read at times as offensive. To make the villains in her story one dimensional Islamic extremists is problematic. The author's choice to use a name similar to a real terrorist organization from that area (the Caucasian Front), but just never mention that they are Islamic extremists does not make it read as less problematic (it just made a lot of the choices read as dog whistles). I am not suggesting this was the author's intention. I do not know the authors intention, but writing a book like this means having to carefully think through the optics of one's choices. This book did not do that. Instead, it settled for a fairly basic anti-terrorism plot that read like something from the 80s without the nuance something like this requires.
The book is also explicitly glorifying violence and gun use in a way that always reads poorly for me, but especially in a novel where the protagonists are teenagers.
Finally, the PTSD depiction was wildly inconsistent. Early in the book everything about all of Europe was a trigger. That kind of generalization of PTSD trigger is not something we see in the mental health field and made her read as xenophobic at times. However, it was inconsistent, because other times she loved everything European.
Overall, I do not think the author did not have bad intentions, but a lot of these things felt like they were not thought out.