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A review by oraclereadings
We'll Never Tell by Wendy Heard
3.0
This had such an interesting concept. Four teenagers with a viral YouTube channel exploring abandoned places, a murder mystery surrounding Hollywood stars from the 1970’s, and a potential serial killer on the loose. I was honestly expecting this to be at least a four star rating, if not at least bumped up to three and a half, but it was just very “meh”.
We follow the story with four high school seniors who run an anonymous YouTube channel with content of them trespassing onto LA’s intriguing locales. On the verge of their senior year and graduation just around the corner, they decide to end their YouTube career with one more video going out with a bang. Their last video will feature the infamous Valentini house, also known as the “murder house”. The house has been left abandoned since the murder/suicide that occurred in 1972 between famous actress and her husband.
During their trip to the murder house, they’re able to capture some footage before an alarm is tripped and it’s a rush to leave before the police show up. Unfortunately, only three of them make it out. Jacob is found at the scene, having been stabbed and in critical condition. The others fear with getting into trouble and risking their future careers if the police knew that they were there with Jacob (an concerned that they may be prime suspects into their friend’s stabbing). So they decide to lie to the police and claim that Jacob must have ventured to the house all by himself.
Because none of them could have obviously done this to Jacob. Right?
For this book to be split between multiple points of view, we only get to hear from two out of four of the main characters.I think that may be because the other two could be suspected of stabbing Jacob, so if we saw into their POV then we would immediately de-suspect them? But there still could have been ways to show their side without leading into too much. Like, what if they were all suspecting each other while constantly being “No, I didn’t do it! They did it!” and we’re just along for the ride. We don’t even hear from Jacob as much as we do Casey, and what we do hear from him is moments before or leading up to the incident.
I know that this is an opinion of my own, but while reading I had to remind myself that these characters were eighteen or soon to be eighteen-year-olds in their senior year of high school and going off to college soon. These teenagers seemed to be a lot younger than they were. And I don’t mean that they were immature, even though there were times that they were, because they ARE teenagers. I don’t know if it was due to the lack of talking about colleges or graduating or high school scenes in general, but my brain kept forgetting that they were soon to be college students.
<i>We’ll Never Tell</i> had a lot of telling instead of showing. It’s described to us many times that the characters are residents of Hollywood, California, but we never actually get to see Hollywood. I was expecting at least some references or even a short description of a celebrity, aside from the ones from the 1970’s, or even a movie in the process of being filmed but there was none of that. I know that wasn’t the main premise of the story-line, but come on, it’s freaking Hollywood!
⋆⁺₊⋆⁺₊⋆
• 𝐡𝐨𝐰 𝐢 𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐛𝐨𝐨𝐤𝐬 •
✰ 3 ✰ Average read. The story/characters were nice, but I’ll most likely forget about it in a month.
━━━━━━━━━━☽✰☾━━━━━━━━━━
We follow the story with four high school seniors who run an anonymous YouTube channel with content of them trespassing onto LA’s intriguing locales. On the verge of their senior year and graduation just around the corner, they decide to end their YouTube career with one more video going out with a bang. Their last video will feature the infamous Valentini house, also known as the “murder house”. The house has been left abandoned since the murder/suicide that occurred in 1972 between famous actress and her husband.
During their trip to the murder house, they’re able to capture some footage before an alarm is tripped and it’s a rush to leave before the police show up. Unfortunately, only three of them make it out. Jacob is found at the scene, having been stabbed and in critical condition. The others fear with getting into trouble and risking their future careers if the police knew that they were there with Jacob (an concerned that they may be prime suspects into their friend’s stabbing). So they decide to lie to the police and claim that Jacob must have ventured to the house all by himself.
Because none of them could have obviously done this to Jacob. Right?
For this book to be split between multiple points of view, we only get to hear from two out of four of the main characters.
I know that this is an opinion of my own, but while reading I had to remind myself that these characters were eighteen or soon to be eighteen-year-olds in their senior year of high school and going off to college soon. These teenagers seemed to be a lot younger than they were. And I don’t mean that they were immature, even though there were times that they were, because they ARE teenagers. I don’t know if it was due to the lack of talking about colleges or graduating or high school scenes in general, but my brain kept forgetting that they were soon to be college students.
<i>We’ll Never Tell</i> had a lot of telling instead of showing. It’s described to us many times that the characters are residents of Hollywood, California, but we never actually get to see Hollywood. I was expecting at least some references or even a short description of a celebrity, aside from the ones from the 1970’s, or even a movie in the process of being filmed but there was none of that. I know that wasn’t the main premise of the story-line, but come on, it’s freaking Hollywood!
⋆⁺₊⋆⁺₊⋆
• 𝐡𝐨𝐰 𝐢 𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐞 𝐛𝐨𝐨𝐤𝐬 •
✰ 3 ✰ Average read. The story/characters were nice, but I’ll most likely forget about it in a month.
━━━━━━━━━━☽✰☾━━━━━━━━━━