Aaaaaahhhhh! I found this the night before I was meant to go back to work after two weeks off from injury…. First few pages and I'm like "library themed escape room"... F*ck me, who needs sleep! And now it's got neurodiverse people, and gays, and dyslexics… OmfOmg!
So good so far! I don’t want to put this book down, which is nice, as I loved book 1, and book 2 was a little less gripping. The cast is great, I tried to write this plot for NaNo and it was WAY HARD, so I’m all in on this one! I LOVE escape rooms. Okay, so I’ve never done one, but I have written and run three, as well as a murder mystery night. As I said above (which was my literally word vomit as I started reading #noescape at 10pm), I tried to write an escape room/locked room mystery for NaNo in 2020. I think I made it about 30,000 words before I bailed, and honestly, it was HARD! So seeing this title, and having read #murdertrending and loving it, I was excited. And I am so so happy that this book was as good as I hoped. Set in the same world* (maybe?) as #murdertrending and #murderfunding, this book starts with our protagonist completing an “impossible” escape room. We learn pretty swiftly that she is not traditional ‘school smart’ - this is done really well through flashbacks - and that she is there only for the money. After this first (her) escape room, she is invited to join a ‘ultimate escape room’, with a prize of $10mil. Things get really fun after that. I loved the details the author had here; each section was so well thought out. I want to climb inside the authors brain (if you’re reading this, can I? In a totally, not creepy, I just wanna see how you work kind of way… no? oh.) and see what it looks like. Having tried to write my own escape room, I know now that I didn’t go nearly big enough! If you loved the first books, if you loved the movie Death Race, read this. I can’t say any more because spoilers, but it’s so well written. It grabbed me and I didn’t want to put it down (who needs to work?), and I inhaled it. It has been added to the list of Top Books I Read in 2021 - I’m that impressed. Content warnings: gore, language, emotional abuse, toxic family relationships Overall Rating: 5+ stars! *I try not to Goodreads before I write my reviews, but I just jumped on and found out that actually this is set 20 years before #murdertrending and OMG I now have so many more questions and theories and I went back and read #murdertrending and #murderfunding** the SECOND I finished #noescape, and now I’m back to #noescape and I’m just like…. I need to read them again with this new knowledge!!!! **and I was wrong, maybe I never finished it the first time, it was good!
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This book. Wow. I mean, I was onboard the moment I read the blurb - it’s a YA mystery set in a camp. A camp where the country's most dangerous teens are sent as an (off the record) alternative to life in prison or a death sentence.
A camp where they LEARN TO KILL BETTER! I wouldn’t recommend this book if you are squeamish… It doesn’t take long at all before we are learning about how to dismember then “dispose of” a body - in reasonably graphic detail. It’s not the sort of thing I was expecting with an author called Lily Sparks - guess that means I shouldn’t judge a book by its cover… didn’t I say this in another review? *sigh* We go into the story with the belief that our main character is innocent of the murder (graphic) of her best friend. Once we meet the other “campers”, it’s hard not to start to wonder if perhaps she’s not entirely truthful. Maybe she does belong there? The other campers are a varied bunch - total 3 girls and 5 boys - all of which have killed at least one person. I really enjoyed that as we learned about certain characters, we learned not only how they kill - come on, death by hacked pacemaker? Brilliant! I need to meet this author and give her a high five! - but also WHY some of them did it. As far as society is concerned, they all set out to do it on purpose, and are non-rehabilitatable. But even though I left the book unsure as to whether Javier was actually a decent human, I actually liked that. It was nice to not have everything wrapped up in a nice little bow. Not going to lie, the twists just keep on coming! I didn’t see all of them, and that was neat! At one point, the character doesn’t even mentally state the theory she has, but the book was so well written that you knew what she was thinking, and accepted it, and then forgot that it hadn’t been confirmed! The writing is beautiful - “Life is a fuse, and I am the red spark shooting towards its end, each moment burning away as soon as I exist within it, bright, sparkling, then gone.” It’s a spectacular juxtaposition to some of the more… murdery writing in the book. Content warnings: gore, more gore, sexual assault (brief and not more than a kiss), language, discussions of drug use, discussions of murder. Overall Rating: 5 stars. (yes, I really need to read something I don’t LOVE, but they just end up being so damn good! Whoo boy. The Diviners. What a series! I’m going to start by saying that
With that out of the way, I want to add that this is a review of the audio book. A lot of the time, this makes no difference to the overall review, but the narrator for The Diviners Series, January LaVoy, is one of the most phenomenal audiobook readers I have ever come across, and I listen to audiobooks literally (no, seriously ask anyone who knows me) every day. The Diviners is a creepy, mysterious, magical, decadent, historical novel set in the 1920’s in New York - home of speakeasies, Ziegfeld Girls, flappers and more. The story starts by following Evie O’Neill - a young girl who is sent to live with her uncle Will, the curator of the "Museum of American Folklore, Superstition, and the Occult" in New York City. Evie is sent to stay with Will because her behaviour is unbecoming of a young lady, so her parents send her away in the hopes that a new location may help her to mature, away from her friends at home. Evie is hiding something, however. She has the power to ‘read’ objects - to see things about their owners, just like a real life psychic. WHat Evie doesn’t realise, until she gets to New York, is that she is not alone. We meet a wide cast of characters in the first book, and a number of them are also Diviners - people with special skills, Characters. This book has a lot! So, briefly, I will separate the main players into categories: Diviners
In the audiobooks, each character has a specific voice; one which reflects their background, race and social standing. Theta - a singer/dancer/actor from Kansas has a deep, throaty voice; Henry - a gay male from Louisiana and best friends with Theta, has a perfect southern drawl; and Memphis - a young black teen from Harlem, has a male-sounding, NYC accent. Honestly, hand on heart, you can come into the audiobook at any point and pick out which of the main characters is speaking. As for the story...Don’t listen to it at night. It’s all about a dead serial killer called Naughty John… There’s a song… just… listen in the daytime, ok? Content Warning: magic, LGBT+, creep factor 1000% (the song on audiobook…*shivers*), gore, death, ghosts, language may be strong, discussions of mental health Overall Rating: 5 stars for the audio, 4.75 for paperback (it’s a very thick book) “I am white, non-binary, queer, and disabled” - Marieke Nijkamp
This is an important statement before I go any further in this review. There is a lot of diversity in this book - out of the five main characters, I think there is only one who doesn’t openly identify with the LBGTQIA+ community, and at least two have significant disabilities (one an invisible illness if I read it right); plus we have an autistic character as well! I will admit, I DID go looking for information on the author, purely because of the amount of representation that we are hit with in the first chapter of this book. Being honest, I was a little wary of just how much there is, as I have had a few experiences recently where it just felt like the author simply wanted to “tick all the boxes” and prove they have diversity. This book however, despite my misgivings at the beginning, made sense and they didn’t feel like lip service. It felt more like when I was in a writing group, and the number of people who were LGBTQIA+, had invisible illnesses, or were on the mental health spectrum felt a lot higher than it did in a group picked from the street at random. And that’s ok. Creative people gravitate together - search disabled cos players for example. The are a lot of them out there, so it didn’t feel off to have that many different people in one place. Ok. So. The beginning. This is my exact notes from 4% of the way into this book: at 4% of the way thru I feel the need to go back and re-read because wait, who TF is Maddy? Is the MC (Finn) trans? they have a binder - injury or chest? have crutches - arth? Is Ever they/them? Word of advice? Stick with it. This book was so good, once I got my head around the craziness that was the first 5-6% where we meet every single character in detail, I didn’t want to put it down. And oh! The TTRPG game NEEDS to be a real game. If the author wanted to make a rule book/playable RPG out of it, I would be all over that. As a D&D nerd, the storytelling by Ever was absolutely beautiful. I would happily read the fantasy series which could use this in-book game as a jumping off point! The teens are on a mountain, venturing into Gonfalon one last time before the end of high school - before they are separated by life moving forwards. Each if the teens is struggling with a secret; with grief; with something they can’ bring themselves to say out loud. Gonfalon and their RPG characters give them a chance to step back from their “real” problems and bond with their friends. Their game is interrupted when the high-tech. modernised “cabin” begins to have electrical problems, and things only go downhill from there, in the classic tradition of Pretty Little Liars, This Lie Will Kill You, There’s Someone Inside Your House, or movies like When A Stranger Calls. The weaving together of the actual flesh and blood humans and their Gonfalon counterparts was perfect. The usage of the game being applied to real life gave the characters something to grasp hold of, to cling to in order to make it through the night. It was a clever parallel with how the group kept the teen together and functioning by creating a family of sorts - people who knew the real you, and didn’t judge. “This world is a messed up and scary place. Life is too short and too hard not to embrace happiness and joy, courage and possibility, and sometimes fear and grief and sorrow too. We have to find our family. We are stronger when we stand against the darkness together, and if our brief moment of happiness is nothing more than a flare, it lights up the path for others." - I think this is my favourite quote, though I highlighted a lot! Content warnings: fantasy, fantasy deaths, death, gore, blood, trans-phobic assault, mental illness, panic attacks, neuro-diversity (accurate thought processes could be triggering), dissociation, drug use. Overall Rating: 4.5 stars - I wanted to give 5 but the beginning was just a little too much knowledge dumpy for me. Will highly recommend however! I received this books as an eARC via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Pub Date - 15 Sept 2022 I was provided with this aArc by NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.
Cassidy Pratt survived a fire as a child, but her neighbour wasn’t as lucky. Ever since, Cass has been haunted by flashbacks of the fire, and has been treated as a social pariah by the popular kids at school. But that’s okay. She has her brother, Asher, and her best friend, Gideon. But things start to unravel for Cassidy when she overhears what could very well be the murder of someone that she knows. Worse? It sounded like it happened exactly the way she had planned it. Our main character is heavily flawed. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as all humans are flawed. She is also a very unreliable narrator. Being a social outcast, as well as teased by the popular crowd, Cass is reluctant to let anyone into her and Gideon’s small, close world. When Cass overhears what she believes to be the murder of the town darling, Melody - who happens to be the cousin of the neighbour who died, as well as Cass’s biggest tormenter - she is reluctant to share everything she knows. Even Gideon, her best friend since she was six, feels like someone she can’t talk to. Because as well as an ingrained belief that Cass herself started the fire all those years ago, she has another secret. She wrote down the exact method the possible killer may have used to do away with Melody. Cass feels that the whole world, apart from Gideon and her brother, Asher, are against her. She can never measure up to her older brother’s stellar school record. She has flashbacks to the fire that plague her at the most inopportune times - such as the middle of a volleyball game. With the disaprearance followed by murder of Melody, Cass is reluctant to tell anyone everything she know. Honestly, this review is getting hard to write without spoilers. So. I thought that the character development for Cass and Gideon was done well - though we know less than we might about Gideon, it vibes with the way that Cass holds things close to her chest. Character development for the rest of the book… Not so great. Asher is home all the time and all we know is that he has his own business, and a friend called Brandon - who Cass doesn’t like. There is a character introduced in the beginning of the book who I didn;t think twice about when they reappeared; as far as I knew, it was our first time meeting them. I thought I knew who-dunnit; I was wrong on my initial instinct but I did figure it out in advance of our main character. In all, not a bad book. I kept reading it, because I wanted to know what happened, and I wasn’t expecting the reveal near the end. Content Warning: Violence, death of a child, death of a teen, fire Overall Rating: 3.5 stars In a near future a teenager, overwhelmed with the knowledge that her mother is terminally ill, chooses to become a part of the latest social media craze – Heartstream – a method of sharing your feelings with others. While wearing the ‘patches’, people can connect to any stream – a playboy partying, a thrill seeker on a theme park tour – and feel what that person is feeling. In the case of Amy, those who stream from her feel her fear, panic and even numbness as she tries to keep moving day after day, knowing her mother is dying in the next room. On the day of Amy’s mother’s funeral, Amy returns home to find a stranger making herself comfortable in her kitchen. What follows is a thrilling twenty or so hours of a hostage situation, during which Amy’s world is turned upside down.
Where to even start? I listened to this book, and it was read by two excellent narrators; one for Cat’s chapters, and one for Amy. It was a long time before I put two and two together, which was nice. I’m not a fan of books where you can see the outcome from the start. This book surprised me in many ways. I wasn’t expecting it to deal with grief as well as it did; the author did a great job of portraying the different emotions of grief, the different stages, and how different people cope in different ways. Amy used Heartstream as a way of distancing herself from her feelings while also, possibly unconsciously, processing them herself. Our other narrator, Cat, is a teenager in the thick of a pop-culture phenomenon surrounding a boyband. The fandom thinks two of the group are a secret couple, and go to extreme lengths to disprove any information that shows otherwise. Cat is deep inside the fandom-come-cult with her best friend and computer (evil) genius, Evie. But what Evie doesn’t know is that the band members are NOT together, and in fact, Cat herself is secretly dating one of them, while also feeding the fandom, trying to keep her relationship a secret. But when Cat becomes pregnant, her hidden secret may soon be revealed, bringing down the wrath of the fandom. I did have a few issues with the story, mostly the portrayal of suicidal thinking being stopped by guilt as to what the rest of the family would think. There were also scenes set in a psychiatric hospital that were raw and painful to read, but not necessarily a damaging or incorrect portrayal of the system itself. Content Warnings: Discussions of sex, birth, gas lighting, violence, death, terminal cancer. If you liked: Black Mirror – You might like this! Rating: **** |