Review: TWO CAN KEEP A SECRET by Karen McManus

Echo Ridge is small-town America. Ellery's never been there, but she's heard all about it. Her aunt went missing there at age seventeen. And only five years ago, a homecoming queen put the town on the map when she was killed. Now Ellery has to move there to live with a grandmother she barely knows.

The town is picture-perfect, but it's hiding secrets. And before school even begins for Ellery, someone's declared open season on homecoming, promising to make it as dangerous as it was five years ago. Then, almost as if to prove it, another girl goes missing.

Ellery knows all about secrets. Her mother has them; her grandmother does too. And the longer she's in Echo Ridge, the clearer it becomes that everyone there is hiding something. The thing is, secrets are dangerous--and most people aren't good at keeping them. Which is why in Echo Ridge, it's safest to keep your secrets to yourself.

My rating: 4.5 stars.

This was so nearly a 5 star read. It was so close, by the end. But it was also so nearly a 3 star read near the beginning.

Let me explain.

This book starts off really well. I was immediately gripped by Ellery and Malcom's story. You've got family secrets, fascinating characters, decades-old mysteries, an intriguing cast, and missing prom queens. But from about the 15% mark to the 30% mark, I felt the pace slowed down a lot.

I was really struggling just to keep reading it. Until--bang. We get a second crime happening in the present timeline. (Spoilers ahead) As soon as Brooke goes missing, the pace picked up and I was eagerly reading. I felt like there really was a threat in the current time (rather than the emphasis being on the past crimes in the town), and it seemed like Ellery could really be in danger. I believed her fear at this point.

By this point, Two Can Keep A Secret was a solid 4 stars for me. And the thing that really made me like the book even more was the reveal of the villain (right to the end, I still had absolutely no idea who had done it) and the final line. Seriously, the final line changes everything. Karen McManus really is a master.

Ellery is a great main character, though it did take me a while to warm to her. I think partly it was because I was comparing her to the female narrators in McManus's first novel, and Ellery is really different.

I also found that Ellery and Malcom's narrative voices weren't as distinguishable from each other as the narrative voices in McManus's first book were, and a couple of times I did get confused about who was narrating each section--particularly as the narration doesn't always alternate between these two main characters.

But all in all, this is a solid YA thriller.

Review: BRAIN ON FIRE by Susannah Cahalan

An award-winning memoir and instant New York Times bestseller that goes far beyond its riveting medical mystery, Brain on Fire is the powerful account of one woman’s struggle to recapture her identity.

When twenty-four-year-old Susannah Cahalan woke up alone in a hospital room, strapped to her bed and unable to move or speak, she had no memory of how she’d gotten there. Days earlier, she had been on the threshold of a new, adult life: at the beginning of her first serious relationship and a promising career at a major New York newspaper. Now she was labeled violent, psychotic, a flight risk. What happened?In a swift and breathtaking narrative, Cahalan tells the astonishing true story of her descent into madness, her family’s inspiring faith in her, and the lifesaving diagnosis that nearly didn’t happen.

My rating: 5 stars

Brain on Fire tells the story of Post journalist Susannah Cahalan, a seemingly healthy twenty-four-year-old as she is struck down with a variety of strange symptoms--seizures, obsession with bedbugs, flu, and hallucinations to name a few--and follows her frightening battle to get diagnosed.

I picked up this book shortly after I was diagnosed with a neuropsychiatric illness and had started writing my own memoir. I wanted to see how Susannah had written hers, and I'd already seen the Netflix adaptation of Brain on Fire, which I thought had been well done.

Like Susannah, I struggled to get a diagnosis and my problems were also assumed to be solely psychological at one point. I related so much to so many things she went through.

This book is wonderfully written. It's poignant and gives a thorough insight into what exactly Susannah experienced--even though a lot of it, she admits she can't remember. Instead, the passages around her month in hospital have been constructed from interviews, tape recordings, and diary entries her family made. Yet this passage is still told in first person. As such, when Susannah describes having a brain biopsy, there was something a little unnerving about hearing each step that was performed, but narrated by her, in first-person. It brought me out of the story a little.

There's a fair bit of medical terminology and medical explanations in here, and at times I found it a little dense. But it really helped to paint a good picture of this illness, and I'd highly recommend it.

Review: HOW TO MAKE FRIENDS WITH THE DARK by Kathleen Glasgow

How to Make Friends with the Dark by Kathleen Glasgow
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I should’ve been prepared for this book. I devoured Kathleen Glasgow’s first book, Girl In Pieces, and I should’ve known her second novel would be just as heart-wrenching, haunting, and powerful.

How to Make Friends With the Dark is the story of Tiger Tolliver as she struggles to cope with the sudden and unexpected death of her mother. These pages are filled with grief, loss, and guilt, and we REALLY feel Tiger’s emotions. This book had me crying in so many places.

Not only does Tiger have to cope with the sudden loss of her mother, but she’s also introduced to family members she didn’t know existed in the course of the book. As the book so elegantly puts it, she has to get used to living without her mother while at the same time get used to living with others who she doesn’t know. And she also goes through the foster care system and is also imprisoned for a brief while (which was a huge shock to me).

We see Tiger really change in this book. We see her angry, lashing out, causing criminal damage, yet we really feel her.

The language is emotive and the imagery beautiful. The words are just SO powerful. I can’t emphasise that enough.

We see a wide range of people in this book. The abusive parents and caregivers, the kind adults who are trying to make it better, the lost boys and girls, and the parents in prison, just to name a few.

The characters are all so real. I feel we could just meet them to easily in the street, in the library, at the gym. And that’s the thing. This book shows how these people are everywhere. And they’re not unusual.

I’m almost at a loss for word as I write this review, that’s how good this book was. Though it was really hard to read at times. But the main thing it teaches its readers is you never know what others are going through, but there is a way to make friends with the dark—the overwhelming grief.

Review: LITTLE MONSTERS by Kara Thomas

Little Monsters by Kara Thomas
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Kara Thomas is an author who’s been recommended to me a number of times as I’ve been navigating my way through YA thrillers, and I finally had time to read one of her books, Little Monsters.

This story follows the story of Kacey, a girl new to town a year ago, who is now best friends with two girls. These girls definitely have the mean girls vibe present in Dana Mele’s People Like Us, and to some extent the tv show Pretty Little Liars (though Little Monsters has a darker, grittier tone). When Kacey’s best friends go to a party and she’s not invited, she wonders why they’re being distant. And then one of them, Bailey, fails to return home.

All eyes point to Kacey, and then her stepbrother, and the mystery unfolds with plenty of twists. In terms of engagement and pacing, this book started out so good. I was enthralled. The set-up is amazing. And the ending was equally good. For me, the middle felt a little flat. For a long time, the pacing seemed a little bit too slow. There were lots of twists there, don’t get me wrong, but I felt like something was lacking a little, perhaps because it started getting so complicated with more questions being raised and very few answers being given.

Having said that, I loved the characters and the family dynamics in particular. You’ve got the stepmother who’s very welcoming, more so than Kacey’s own father, the absent mother, the stepbrother who is a great friend, and the half-sister who dotes in Kacey. But there’s also something off about her, and it’s here where I got the same vibes as (spoiler alert!) Gillian Flynn’s Sharp Objects in terms of the little sister.

So let’s talk about the ending and the reveal of Bailey’s murderer. (Spoilers in this paragraph; skip ahead to the next one if you don’t want to know the identity of the murderer!) Given that we have the story told from both Kacey’s POV and the diary extracts of Bailey before she goes missing/is murdered, I felt so sure that the murderer was Jade, the other best friend as it had to be someone close to both of the narrators. But there was also something off about Lauren, the little sister, so to find out I was right about both of them was a great payoff. And it happened so quickly at the end. Suddenly, bam, it was there. And even though I’d worked out who it had to be, by process of deduction, the way the reveal unfurled was still engaging and I couldn’t read fast enough.

The final two lines of the book also provide another twist and make you see things differently, which I particularly loved.

All in all, this is a highly recommend thriller for young adults.

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Review: PRETTY DEAD GIRLS by Monica Murphy

Beautiful. Perfect. Dead.

In the peaceful seaside town of Cape Bonita, wicked secrets and lies are hidden just beneath the surface. But all it takes is one tragedy for them to be exposed.

The most popular girls in school are turning up dead, and Penelope Malone is terrified she's next. All the victims so far have been linked to Penelope—and to a boy from her physics class. The one she's never really noticed before, with the rumored dark past and a brooding stare that cuts right through her.

There's something he isn't telling her. But there's something she's not telling him, either.

Everyone has secrets, and theirs might get them killed.


FIVE STARS

I've been on the look out for amazing YA thrillers recently, and PRETTY DEAD GIRLS by Monica Murphy definitely fits this criteria. In short, this book is amazing. 

I'll be honest, when I started it, I wasn't totally convinced of just how great this story was going to be. I've just started watching Pretty Little Liars on Netflix, and the opening of this book reminded me A LOT of that show. You've got the same set-up: a group of popular high school girls, and one of them has been murdered, with the others looking for the identity of the murderer. PRETTY DEAD GIRLS didn't feel like anything spectacular--until I got to the 30% mark or there about, when I realised that we were also having the odd chapter narrated by the murderer. 

It's all first person narrative with no tags for who is narrating, and there'd been a few instances where I was confused as Penny's narrative style suddenly seemed to change. (Particularly the first chapter where I got very dark vibes and wondered if the narrator was the murderer--but as I read on and learned more about Penny, I doubted she was really the murderer and that the first chapter had been set to throw me off the scent). But at the 30% mark, I realised that some of the chapters weren't narrated by Penny. Instead it really was the murderer, and we see the murderer in the lead-up to the next deaths. 

When Lex is the second girl to die, I felt really invested. This is where this book went from being okay to amazing, and I just couldn't read fast enough. We follow Penny and Cass as they investigate, and as they realise that all the Larks girls are being killed off, one by one. 

What struck me about PRETTY DEAD GIRLS is that I think this is the first murder mystery YA thriller that I've read where I didn't have a clue who the murderer was until the end. Every time I thought I knew, the murderer's own narration would then mention my suspect in a way that made it clear that it wasn't them. And because the murderer never gives us any clues on their identity--other than that they're female--I was so stumped. And, despite this, I was STILL suspecting one of the boys in the story as I just couldn't figure out who it was going to be. 

When the murderer is revealed, it was a tense and well-written scene that brought everything together in a wonderful and concise way. I was very impressed. 

This book definitely seems to be written with teenage readers in mind. I'm in my mid-20s, and I was struck by how often the characters Snapchatted each other and how many selfies they took, but this really helped ground it as a YA novel, and I loved this so much. 

The romance in this book between Penny and Cass is low-key and very much secondary to the who-is-killing-the-girls storyline. That, I really appreciated as it wouldn't have made sense for the romance to be central, given that Penny's friends keep turning up dead and that she's possibly next. 

Penny is a great character. Complex and relatable, likeable and still a bit prickly. Her relationship with Cass is turbulent, with lots of on/off moments that felt very believable. And Cass himself is so well written. He's got just the right amount of intrigue and charm, says some really heart-wrenching lines that make him a perfect brooding YA hero, and has a dark past that links to many of the dead girls. 

In short, I loved this book and highly recommend it. 

Review: GIRLS WITH SHARP STICKS by Suzanne Young

Girls with Sharp Sticks by Suzanne Young
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Wow. Girls With Sharp Sticks is incredible. By far the best book I’ve read this year, and that’s saying something as I’ve had some incredible reads.

Okay, so this review is going to contain spoilers. I almost want to write this as a review purely for me, to remind myself later on just how amazing this book is. Suzanne Young is incredible and I’ll definitely be getting her other books.

So, Girls With Sharp Sticks is a blend of things. It’s a contemporary boarding school story that swiftly becomes a terrifying dystopian, futuristic but so close to us. The story is set in a school where girls are trained to become the perfect women for men. We meet Mena, an obedient girl who doesn’t want to upset the men who look after her. But meeting Jackson changes everything. She’s accidentally defiant to her Guardian, and it’s this that sparks the events that lead her to “wake up” and discover the truth of what’s going on at Innovations Academy: (huge spoiler alert!) These girls weren’t born. They were created.

This story is a blend of Frankenstein (Mary Shelley) and Vox (Christina Dalcher) and The Walls Around Us (Nova Ren Suma). It’s got a touch of Teri Terry’s Mind Games. There’s so much packed into this story and it works beautifully.

This is a feminist message about girls fighting back. It exposes the sexist ideology of modern day society by exaggerating it. But it also offers a message of hope.

And not all the men are bad. Jackson and Winston and Quentin fight the girls. Jackson tells Mena that she is real though she was created, and that she does have rights—just when she’s heard from the other men how she is just a product made to satisfy.

This book really is incredible. I also truly loved how it explores the power of words and writing. The girls spread their plans for rebellion and “wake” each other up by sharing a book of poems—one of which is called “Girls With Sharp Sticks”. This book almost becomes their voice, their way of discovering the truth, and finding the strength to fight and the way in which they can. And the book was given to them by the wife of the owner of the academy—a lady, it is revealed, was once an Innovations girl. The wife, Leandra, is just like them. And it’s she who manages to get five of the girls out at the end of the story, choosing to sacrifice her own chance of freedoms so she can stay behind with the intention of saving the other girls.

All the girls are so distinguishable. That was something that really wowed me. It’s predominantly an all-girl cast, but they’re all so individual and easy to tell apart. I loved them all. Mena, Syndney, Brynn, Annalise, Lennon Rose, Marcella, Valentine, Rebecca...

And it was great that this is a YA book with no romance. Sure, Jackson is obviously the love interest for Mena, and it’s clear there will be a second book as the ending leads to the set-up for taking the academy down, but in this book, Jackson’s priority is clearly to rescue all the girls at the end, not just Mena.

So, at about the 20% mark I did wonder whether Mena and the other girls at the academy were robots. There was something that felt off about them, but I dismissed this theory because Mena just felt so real. She’s our narrator and we feel her emotions, her soul. So when it was revealed at the end that all the girls there are robotic, I was stunned—even though I had previously questioned it.

There’s some uncomfortable scenes in this book. Violence against women. Sexual abuse. Emotional and physical abuse. But the messages are so important. I’m going to be recommending this book for years, I can tell already.

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Review: BOOK OF FIRE by Michelle Kenney

My rating: 5 stars

About Book Of Fire: 


Life outside the domes is not possible. At least that’s what Insiders are told.
Twins Eli and Talia shouldn’t exist. They’re Outsiders.

Their home is a secret. Their lives are a secret. Arafel is a secret.

An unexpected forest raid forces Talia into a desperate mission to rescue her family while protecting the sacred Book of Arafel from those who would use it as a weapon. As Talia and her life long friend Max enter the dome, she makes some unexpected discoveries, and allies, in the form of rugged Insider August, that will change the course of her life forever.

She’ll stop at nothing to save her family but will she sacrifice her heart in the process?

The Fire Sermon meets Gladiator in this brilliant YA debut.

--

Firstly, huge thank you to the publisher, author, and NetGalley, for providing me with a review copy of this book. 

So, I went into this book not really knowing what to expect, and the first thing that struck me was the language. It's so lyrical and beautiful, and there's something almost haunting about the imagery and tone. The language itself reminded me a lot of the style employed in both The Clan of the Cave Bear and The Walls Around Us. They both have the immersive, lyrical quality that Book of Fire has. Yet Michelle Kenney's novel also has the high stakes of The Hunger Games (I'm always doubtful when I see that one used as a comp title due to how huge it is, but here it really works). 

I'll confess, it did take me a little while to get used to this writing style that is lyrical and beauitful but that covers a lot of action. It felt a little slower at first than other YA novels I'm used to, but once I was used to Michelle Kenney's voice, I could not read fast enough. I just had to know what happens. 

Both Eli and Talia are fully fleshed characters and very well written. I must admit, I love stories with twins--that was one of the reasons I requested a review copy of this book in particular--and the bond these two share is really well written. I also really liked that Eli is Deaf, and yet he's still treated as a valuable member of society for his way with animal and wild creatures. So often, disabled characters are often treated as a burden in fiction, but I really appreciated this representation. 

The other characters are well-written too, and I especially loved the grandfather. Each character has strengths and flaws. 

I really liked the worldbuilding. It's refreshing and new, and gives a lovely twist on your standard fantasy and sci-fi stories. There's also a touch of dystopian in there too, which I adored. The world itself is hugely imaginative and everything is layered nicely, and I loved how we're given the history of this world too, yet there's not really any sections that are heavy in backstory. Instead, everything is woven in pretty seamlessly. And normally, when I've read Dome stories, the MC has been one who lives on the inside--Talia lives on the outside, and it's the insiders who are the threat, and that just felt so new.  A couple of times, I'd forgotten what the 'terminology' in this book referred to, but this wasn't a problem, as Kenney defly weaves clues in to remind you who's who--it was mainly the Sweepers who I kept getting confused about. 

(Also, Exeter is mentioned, and as a local, I loved that!)

I really liked the contrast of the insiders and the outsiders. It was well-thought out and incredibly well executed, the old 'natural' ways vs technology. 

Overall, Book Of Fire is a tightly plotted fantasy story of deception vs truth, and loyalty vs betrayal, with incredibly well written characters and a plot that will keep you on the edge of your seat.