izzywayout 's review for:

This Is Our Story by Ashley Elston

3.0

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The girl with the camera is going to be a problem.

if i'd read this book when i was fifteen years old, i might've not given up on my dreams of law school.

(okay, who am i kidding. law school would still be a no for me but i would've certainly thought harder about it.)

the story is about a murder in a small louisiana town. four privileged rich boys are accused of being negligent and accidentally murdering another friend of the group as they went hunting while they were drunk and high. or maybe not so accidentally. kate is a high school who interns at the DA's office and has private interests in the case, and as she helps her boss and her mom (who's his secretary) figure out what happen to bring justice to the dead teenager, a lot goes down and she gets way more sucked into the story she thought she would.

my favorite thing about this was, surprisingly, a small detail - as we follow the characters through school it's such a realistic setting. granted, it's been a good four years since i was last in high school (thank god) but my experience was a lot more like the one portrayed here than i usually see in YA books. kate and her closest friends are in the school's paper, and there are cheerleaders and jocks and the whole shebang, but overall kids mingle. there's none of those over the top cliques or extreme segregating that's usually seen, and they all party together and know each other relatively well, and i thought that was something so refreshing.

regarding the characters themselves, other than kate we don't really... know them. she has friends, and they're a big part of her story, but none have a lot of personality to single themselves out. even the river point boys aren't given a lot of character development - they're rich, they're troubled, they leer a lil' bit of the evil side and that's about it. except for kate's favorite, of course - but even he just turns out to be not-so-evil and not-so-spoiled and it's not elaborated on much further than that.

kate herself was an interesting character. she did make some stupid decisions, but i enjoyed following her especially because of her relationship with her boss and her mom. it's nice to see a teenage character who doesn't think every adult in her life is either out to get her or is just plain stupid. she made mistakes, but when they confronted her with them she owned up to it, and i liked that. and as for the romance - it's a YA contemporary mystery. of course there's a romance.

i also thought the author could've talked more abot gun safety and the dangers of having guns around, but maybe that's just because i really, really hate guns.

the extra .5 star is for the mystery itself. the story is very procedural because, seeing as kate works at the DA's office, it follow that side of things. that's something i tend to enjoy in my thrillers, and it wasn't different here. i thought it was very well done. it was interesting seeing how much kate actually got to do since she wasn't a lawyer, and although i don't think a DA would ever actually let an intern get so involved in a case, it made sense in the context created here. it wasn't one of those stories where the character is basically a 17 years old prodigy who solves murders all on her own.

overall, i really enjoyed it and i read the whole thing in a day. i really couldn't put it down for the last few chapters.