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A review by cryrider
One of Us Is Next by Karen M. McManus
3.5
I have so many thoughts?? I don’t really know how I feel, so I’m not going to rate it right now.
Review to come
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Actual Review
Sooooo I´m giving this book a 4 star because I only had a few problems with it and I absolutely devoured this book overall. I enjoyed every second of it, BUT there are some things that I didn´t really like or care for too much, which I´ll get into now.
1) Phoebe´s secret that´s revealed was way too similar to Addy´s from the first book. Phoebe hooks up with her sister´s boyfriend and Addy cheats on her boyfriend with her boyfriend´s friend. I actually rolled my eyes a little bit when Phoebe´s little secret was out because it was so anti-climatic to me. The author could´ve come up with something a lot more interesting.
2) There´s two times where a character is sexually assaulted or harassed and I think it was unnecessary for it to happen twice. If you want to add in sexual assault into your story, okay then. But doing it twice--back-to-back, essentially--is weird to me, especially when it didn´t need to be there at all. First Phoebe gets sexually assaulted by Brandon. I feel like authors don´t know how to write shitty male characters without making them assault the main lead, even though we clearly saw how much of a terrible person Brandon was already, so we didn´t need him to do that at all. And then Jules assaults Nate at Cafe Contigo for a dare. This I feel slightly different about. This would´ve been fine to me (the scene itself was written well enough) if Jules ever got told off for doing that.
3) Jules was a terrible character. She was a bitch the entire time and recieved no type of repercussions for it, and she was just forgiven in the end? It was so weird to me. She also had the cringest lines in the book and I hated reading any conversation that her character was present in.
4) The ending? I have no words, honestly. I didn´t know how to feel about the ending and still don´t. I won´t get into spoilers but the ending doesn´t make much sense to me.
5) I wasn´t connected to these characters as much as the ones from the first book, not gonna lie. I liked them, but I didn´t care about them as much.
That´s all for the negatives of this book. This review has made me see that this book is more of a 3.5 star read. I want to end off on a positive note, though, so I want to talk about some things I really liked.
- I love how the author describes very mundane things, like characters pouring gingerale and waiting for it to fizzle out before pouring more. It helps me imagine the scene more clearly and I don´t know, I really like it.
- The overall plot in this book was 10x more interesting to me.
- The little bits of news scripts talking about the kid who died had me GRIPPED. I just could not wait to find out who it was and how it went down
- I loved the little parallel with Maeve being scared to get on Luis´s bike (like with Nate and Bronwyn in book one). It was really cute.
Review to come
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Actual Review
Sooooo I´m giving this book a 4 star because I only had a few problems with it and I absolutely devoured this book overall. I enjoyed every second of it, BUT there are some things that I didn´t really like or care for too much, which I´ll get into now.
1) Phoebe´s secret that´s revealed was way too similar to Addy´s from the first book. Phoebe hooks up with her sister´s boyfriend and Addy cheats on her boyfriend with her boyfriend´s friend. I actually rolled my eyes a little bit when Phoebe´s little secret was out because it was so anti-climatic to me. The author could´ve come up with something a lot more interesting.
2) There´s two times where a character is sexually assaulted or harassed and I think it was unnecessary for it to happen twice. If you want to add in sexual assault into your story, okay then. But doing it twice--back-to-back, essentially--is weird to me, especially when it didn´t need to be there at all. First Phoebe gets sexually assaulted by Brandon. I feel like authors don´t know how to write shitty male characters without making them assault the main lead, even though we clearly saw how much of a terrible person Brandon was already, so we didn´t need him to do that at all. And then Jules assaults Nate at Cafe Contigo for a dare. This I feel slightly different about. This would´ve been fine to me (the scene itself was written well enough) if Jules ever got told off for doing that.
3) Jules was a terrible character. She was a bitch the entire time and recieved no type of repercussions for it, and she was just forgiven in the end? It was so weird to me. She also had the cringest lines in the book and I hated reading any conversation that her character was present in.
4) The ending? I have no words, honestly. I didn´t know how to feel about the ending and still don´t. I won´t get into spoilers but the ending doesn´t make much sense to me.
5) I wasn´t connected to these characters as much as the ones from the first book, not gonna lie. I liked them, but I didn´t care about them as much.
That´s all for the negatives of this book. This review has made me see that this book is more of a 3.5 star read. I want to end off on a positive note, though, so I want to talk about some things I really liked.
- I love how the author describes very mundane things, like characters pouring gingerale and waiting for it to fizzle out before pouring more. It helps me imagine the scene more clearly and I don´t know, I really like it.
- The overall plot in this book was 10x more interesting to me.
- The little bits of news scripts talking about the kid who died had me GRIPPED. I just could not wait to find out who it was and how it went down
- I loved the little parallel with Maeve being scared to get on Luis´s bike (like with Nate and Bronwyn in book one). It was really cute.