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sleepydoe 's review for:
All Your Twisted Secrets
by Diana Urban
3.5 ⭐
Review coming soon~✨
Edit:
I received this book from The Fantastic Flying Book Club as part of their blog tour! All the following opinions are my own!
Rating- 3.5 stars
All Your Twisted Secrets is a young adult thriller/mystery novel which features an extreme Escape Room scenario that traps six seemingly random kids together and there is only one way that they're getting out of there- they can choose to kill one of their own or they all die.
Trigger warnings for- bullying, physical violence, suicide, domestic abuse, depression, death of a sibling, fatphobia, (mild) homophobia.
When I saw the premise of this book, I was instantly sucked in! Even though it seemed a little out there for me to see six kids from nowhere, New York being faced with a plot weirdly intricate, I was definitely able to suspend my belief enough for me to enjoy the novel. That being said, the book wasn't without its issues. Before I get into those, let me just tell you guys what I liked first!
The story is told from the perspective of out main character- Amber Prescott, who is a quiet music nerd and is, in general, not too unlikeable. We watch the story unfold in two timelines- one, counting down the hour that the they are trapped in the escape room and the other starting about 14 months before the night in question and slowly edging towards the present - and I really like that! I usually love non-linear narration in books and the mystery of the "culprit" behind the whole setup was a great one to bury in the two timelines, imo. That way, you only get some information at a time and it's very thrilling to watch as the events of the present start making sense with the context of the past. This is nothing new, of course- so many thrillers use this method- but it works! And it was executed fairly well in this novel.
I loved that the novel kept me on my toes. I ended up reading the whole thing in one sitting. Granted, I was doing a readathon at the time, but I ended up reading on even after the stipulated time just to finish the whole thing off because it was just addictive in that way. I liked that aspect about the book a lot! I think it would make a pretty great TV series/movie in the vein of Pretty Little Liars and the like, and I really hope it does get picked up for something like that soon!
The characters were also kind of decent? They were very two-dimensional in one way, but also, they kind of worked in places. I don't exactly expect an intricate character study when I go into a thriller, and so I didn't expect one here, either, and I felt like everyone fit where they were supposed to fit and did what felt like the directly expected thing of them. I would've loved a little more exploration, but also it isn't something that bugged me too much!
The thing that did bug me, however, was the plot twist of the book. It came out of nowhere and hit me in the face, and not in a good way. I think a good plot twist in a thriller is one that you don't see coming, but once it happens, you can totally see that it makes sense and you feel a little like an idiot because it feels so obvious. The clues to the solution should be buried in the story all along, if in plain sight. That didn't happen here. The only clue to the reveal showed up at ,like, what? 70%? And it was way too obvious that the reveal didn't hit like it was supposed to. And that really disappointed me. I was inclined to give the book 4 stars, but the twist really made me drop that rating.
I also wasn't a fan of the whole high school drama thing that was going on. I knew it would be there but I was still annoyed, anyway. I don't know. I understand the consequences of some of the shit that people pull in, like, high schools and stuff, but also some of the stuff in here seemed really petty and silly and just overall unrelatable for me. I don't want to write it off as stupid, because I'm sure there are people who relate, but the American high school system will always be a mystery to me, not gonna lie.
And lastly, the one thing that made me really annoyed in this book was the lack of subtlety. Every message the author wanted to send was just so in-the-face and it annoyed me to no end. In the climax scene of the novel, when the bully is confronted with her actions, and everyone asks her why she is the way she is and she - and I'm not making this shit up - says that it's "Because she never got to be who she wanted to be". If she had that level of self-awareness, she wouldn't have done half the things she did. Unless she was a sociopath. In which case, I guess that's fair? I don't know. Even the main character goes off about whatever is going on in her mind all the time and there is nothing left for interpretation there either. She just straight up states her intentions like she's reading it off an overly descriptive Victorian novel lol. If that stuff had been cut down a little, I'd have really appreciated the book!
All in all, it was definitely not a bad read , but it had the potential to be so much more and left me a little disappointed!
Review coming soon~✨
Edit:
I received this book from The Fantastic Flying Book Club as part of their blog tour! All the following opinions are my own!
Rating- 3.5 stars
All Your Twisted Secrets is a young adult thriller/mystery novel which features an extreme Escape Room scenario that traps six seemingly random kids together and there is only one way that they're getting out of there- they can choose to kill one of their own or they all die.
Trigger warnings for- bullying, physical violence, suicide, domestic abuse, depression, death of a sibling, fatphobia, (mild) homophobia.
When I saw the premise of this book, I was instantly sucked in! Even though it seemed a little out there for me to see six kids from nowhere, New York being faced with a plot weirdly intricate, I was definitely able to suspend my belief enough for me to enjoy the novel. That being said, the book wasn't without its issues. Before I get into those, let me just tell you guys what I liked first!
The story is told from the perspective of out main character- Amber Prescott, who is a quiet music nerd and is, in general, not too unlikeable. We watch the story unfold in two timelines- one, counting down the hour that the they are trapped in the escape room and the other starting about 14 months before the night in question and slowly edging towards the present - and I really like that! I usually love non-linear narration in books and the mystery of the "culprit" behind the whole setup was a great one to bury in the two timelines, imo. That way, you only get some information at a time and it's very thrilling to watch as the events of the present start making sense with the context of the past. This is nothing new, of course- so many thrillers use this method- but it works! And it was executed fairly well in this novel.
I loved that the novel kept me on my toes. I ended up reading the whole thing in one sitting. Granted, I was doing a readathon at the time, but I ended up reading on even after the stipulated time just to finish the whole thing off because it was just addictive in that way. I liked that aspect about the book a lot! I think it would make a pretty great TV series/movie in the vein of Pretty Little Liars and the like, and I really hope it does get picked up for something like that soon!
The characters were also kind of decent? They were very two-dimensional in one way, but also, they kind of worked in places. I don't exactly expect an intricate character study when I go into a thriller, and so I didn't expect one here, either, and I felt like everyone fit where they were supposed to fit and did what felt like the directly expected thing of them. I would've loved a little more exploration, but also it isn't something that bugged me too much!
The thing that did bug me, however, was the plot twist of the book. It came out of nowhere and hit me in the face, and not in a good way. I think a good plot twist in a thriller is one that you don't see coming, but once it happens, you can totally see that it makes sense and you feel a little like an idiot because it feels so obvious. The clues to the solution should be buried in the story all along, if in plain sight. That didn't happen here. The only clue to the reveal showed up at ,like, what? 70%? And it was way too obvious that the reveal didn't hit like it was supposed to. And that really disappointed me. I was inclined to give the book 4 stars, but the twist really made me drop that rating.
I also wasn't a fan of the whole high school drama thing that was going on. I knew it would be there but I was still annoyed, anyway. I don't know. I understand the consequences of some of the shit that people pull in, like, high schools and stuff, but also some of the stuff in here seemed really petty and silly and just overall unrelatable for me. I don't want to write it off as stupid, because I'm sure there are people who relate, but the American high school system will always be a mystery to me, not gonna lie.
And lastly, the one thing that made me really annoyed in this book was the lack of subtlety. Every message the author wanted to send was just so in-the-face and it annoyed me to no end. In the climax scene of the novel, when the bully is confronted with her actions, and everyone asks her why she is the way she is and she - and I'm not making this shit up - says that it's "Because she never got to be who she wanted to be". If she had that level of self-awareness, she wouldn't have done half the things she did. Unless she was a sociopath. In which case, I guess that's fair? I don't know. Even the main character goes off about whatever is going on in her mind all the time and there is nothing left for interpretation there either. She just straight up states her intentions like she's reading it off an overly descriptive Victorian novel lol. If that stuff had been cut down a little, I'd have really appreciated the book!
All in all, it was definitely not a bad read , but it had the potential to be so much more and left me a little disappointed!