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A review by antimony
The Last Secret You'll Ever Keep by Laurie Faria Stolarz
mysterious
- Loveable characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
2.0
i will be honest, i did not enjoy this book. i could not stand terra. and that's too bad, because i did really like jane anonymous, and i did enjoy welcome to the dark house as well! but terra just kept bothering me.
frankly, until the end, i did not believe her either, and i was sure that [her abduction not being real] would be the reveal. i believed that she had been missing and maybe fallen into the well or something, but i couldn't get over how unrealistic the abduction itself was. not to sound callous, but if a stranger picks someone up off of the side of the road (or breaks into their house to grab them) they are probably going to torture/attack/kill/etc them. not just abandon them in a well. it was so so strange. and i know that it was revealed terra did know him after all, but that was in the last 50 or so pages, and felt so so bizzarre and out of nowhere (i was kinda thinking charley wasn't real either) that it didn't feel like a satisfying reveal. and at the end -- everything wrapped up in a way that i suppose makes sense, but it didn't feel at all like what the book was leading to. (besides peyton not being real and darwin also not being real (and being the same person pretending to be peyton) . that part made sense.)
also, i couldn't get past the way people talked in the jane anonymous chatroom.....assuming that this is set in the past couple of years, which i'm sure it is, no one is punctuating every sentence with #Truth #Confession #WhatIDidLastNight. i think millenials in 2012 probably were (though i can't confirm bc in 2012 i was not using the ocmputer for anything besides webkinz and pixie hollow) but these are teenagers in 2020 and i guarantee you they are not typing like that. i also don't understand why, if they have DM capability (to ask each other if they want to go to a private chatroom), did terra and peyton always talk in private chatrooms they had to open and link to rather than just talking in their dms? it's not like it was three people on a site that may not have group chat capabilities. but whatever.
but that's a small & nitpicky thing to complain about. mostly i just couldn't stand how absolutely none of terra's abduction made any sense whatsoever until the last 50 pages.
at least it wasn't boring! i was able to focus on this book for more than five minutes at a time without putting it down, which is a point in its favor.
frankly, until the end, i did not believe her either, and i was sure that [her abduction not being real] would be the reveal. i believed that she had been missing and maybe fallen into the well or something, but i couldn't get over how unrealistic the abduction itself was. not to sound callous, but if a stranger picks someone up off of the side of the road (or breaks into their house to grab them) they are probably going to torture/attack/kill/etc them. not just abandon them in a well. it was so so strange.
also, i couldn't get past the way people talked in the jane anonymous chatroom.....assuming that this is set in the past couple of years, which i'm sure it is, no one is punctuating every sentence with #Truth #Confession #WhatIDidLastNight. i think millenials in 2012 probably were (though i can't confirm bc in 2012 i was not using the ocmputer for anything besides webkinz and pixie hollow) but these are teenagers in 2020 and i guarantee you they are not typing like that. i also don't understand why, if they have DM capability (to ask each other if they want to go to a private chatroom), did terra and peyton always talk in private chatrooms they had to open and link to rather than just talking in their dms? it's not like it was three people on a site that may not have group chat capabilities. but whatever.
but that's a small & nitpicky thing to complain about. mostly i just couldn't stand how absolutely none of terra's abduction made any sense whatsoever until the last 50 pages.
at least it wasn't boring! i was able to focus on this book for more than five minutes at a time without putting it down, which is a point in its favor.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Kidnapping