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.