Book Review: “All Your Twisted Secrets”

I am so incredibly excited to share this review with you! Seriously, I have never been this excited to write a review before and this is for one main reason: This is a review of the first ever ARC (Advanced Reading Copy) I received. I was so lucky to receive an e-ARC of this book from Harper Teen and Diana Urban (who you may recognize from the interview I posted a few weeks ago). Not only was it exciting because it was an ARC, but I am so glad to say that I legitimately loved this book and now get to tell you all about it!

NOTE: I received this book for free and this didn’t affect the honesty of my review. 

Title: All Your Twisted Secrets

Author: Diana Urban

Genre: YA mystery and thriller

Rating: 5/5 Stars

Synopsis: “Welcome to dinner, and again, congratulations on being selected. Now you must do the selecting. What do the queen bee, star athlete, valedictorian, stoner, loner, and music geek all have in common? They were all invited to a scholarship dinner, only to discover it’s a trap. Someone has locked them into a room with a bomb, a syringe filled with poison, and a note saying they have an hour to pick someone to kill … or else everyone dies.

Amber Prescott is determined to get her classmates and herself out of the room alive, but that might be easier said than done. No one knows how they’re all connected or who would want them dead. As they retrace the events over the past year that might have triggered their captor’s ultimatum, it becomes clear that everyone is hiding something. And with the clock ticking down, confusion turns into fear, and fear morphs into panic as they race to answer the biggest question: Who will they choose to die?”

As soon as I got this book, I dove into it and read it for the next few days (at which point I had then finished). I was nervous because I wanted to like it so much and also because I soon found out that this book is told in alternating chapters of current time and flashbacks. Flashbacks can be a tricky thing to accomplish in books because they can easily seem irrelevant or confusing to the reader (and especially in mysteries when subtle clues need to be given and foreshadowing is extra important). However, after the first few chapters I fell into the rhythm of things and by the end of the book, oh boy, did I realize that the foreshadowing had been done flawlessly! Yes, the end was everything I have ever wanted in a mystery and if I can recommend this book to you for one reason it is just so you can experience that incredible ending.

If you do decide to try it out, then hopefully you’ll also enjoy the fast pace that keeps you guessing and the engaging characters. In other words, the ending wasn’t the sole reason I enjoyed this read! This book had a great cast of characters that were not only realistic, but also each unique and fascinating in their own ways. It was so interesting to see how they all developed throughout the hour, while also seeing how they were before the dinner party started. The thing that really made these characters stand out to me as a reader was their witty dialogue and their altogether realistic vibes. I felt like they could easily be real teenagers that go to a high school nearby, which made it so much easier to immerse myself in the story.

Overall, I thought this was a unique and cleverly plotted thriller with a deep message and a shocking finale. If you like thrillers, you’ll definitely want to have this on your 2020 TBR so you can read it when it comes out next March.

Happy reading! What is your favourite thriller novel?

Mayah XO

Copyright 2019