Nothing is as it seems in this psychological YA thriller set in a not-too-distant future sure to appeal to fans of The Girl on the Train, Luckiest Girl Alive, and We Were Liars.
ALL HER SECRETS
by Kate Avery Ellison
Published: October 18, 2016
Publisher: Kate Avery Ellison
ISBN:
9780998103907
Length: 289 pages
Genre: Teen & YA Suspense, Psychological Thriller
A
GIRL WITH SECRETS
Eighteen-year-old
Victoria, the daughter of inventor and visionary-genius Bill Faraday, was
almost murdered by a stranger four years ago. She's been trying to forget the
incident ever since.
When
Victoria discovers something that might explain why she was brutally attacked,
she heads home from college to uncover the truth. Then, she’s kidnapped.
A
GUY FROM THE WRONG SIDE OF THE TRACKS
Sam’s
just a poor kid from Toivo, an experimental utopia gone wrong, but he knows who
Victoria is as soon as his cousin Craig drags her from the trees. He doesn’t
want anything to do with what appears to be a revenge kidnapping, but Craig has
a gun and needs someone to take the fall if things go wrong.
A
DESPERATE PLAN TO SURVIVE
Craig
and his buddies imprison Sam and Victoria in an abandoned mountain cabin to
await ransom. Putting aside mistrust for tentative friendship, Victoria and Sam
conspire to escape together, and the close quarters ignite a startling
attraction between them. Then they discover strange tunnels beneath the cabin.
And what they find inside the tunnels proves more bizarre.
With
a plan in place to escape, freedom seems within reach. But Sam and Victoria are
both keeping secrets about their past.
And
secrets can be deadly.
Excerpt:
You’re never prepared for the
sound of someone breaking down your front door.
The wood splinters, the sound
like a bone snapping. The doorknob hits the wall. My adrenaline is a gunshot to
my chest.
BAM.
For a moment, I am perfectly
still, the frog in the flashlight beam. My book falls onto the covers with a
muffled thump. My hands are shaking and my vision is blurry. I can’t breathe
right. This doesn’t feel real, but I know it is.
We have a security system, state
of the art, but it doesn’t go off. Why doesn’t it go off?
More splintering sounds, a loud
thud, a slam. Footsteps.
I hear voices.
I run toward the window. It
doesn’t have a latch. It isn’t supposed to open. Of course not. I hit it with
the heels of my hands, but I know the glass won’t break, because it is
bulletproof.
They had to have heard that. I
have to get out of here now.
I kick the glass so hard I fall
back on the bed. When I push myself up, somebody’s in the doorway.
Everything slows down and becomes
painfully distinct.
He’s not tall, but he’s muscled,
with a blunt, square face. The dark shape of him in my doorway is foreign and
wrong, like a spider in the shower. He’s blocking the hall, and behind him, I
barely hear the shatter of things falling in the kitchen over the roaring of
blood in my ears.
He’s looking at me, and I’m
looking at him. My mind jumps ahead to what is going to happen next, but then I
stop thinking about that because I’m not going to give up yet. The feeling
surges inside me, a wave of fierce and terrible protest.
He yells something to someone in
another room, but I can’t understand him. My brain has stopped processing
language. Instead, I’m seeing the room around me. The exits. There’s no door
out except the one he’s standing in. I can’t run through the walls.
I’m trapped.
The world slows down. Time feels
like cement, and every eye blink takes a thousand years. I reach behind me and
grab anything I can reach—a hairbrush. It’s the most worthless weapon in the
world, but I clutch it to my chest like it’s a knife. I’m thinking, WHERE IS MY
CELL PHONE?
I can’t breathe.
A girl steps into the doorway
beside the guy. She has dark brown hair and a flawlessly beautiful face, but
her smile is angry. A toboggan hat is pulled down almost to her eyebrows, and
she’s wearing slouchy torn jeans. She’s chewing gum, and she blows a bright
pink bubble as she points at me. Her fingernails are painted sky blue.
They come around the bed. I back
up to the wall. My heart slams against my ribs.
Fight, flight, or freeze. Those
are my options. I can’t flee, so fight or freeze?
I pick fight.
All Her Secrets is a YA psychological thriller set for release
in late October. While Thrillers
and Dystopian are not usually my thing, the beautiful cover art and the blurb
drew me in and made me want to read it.
I anticipated some suspense, some danger and a little romance on the
side. What I got was a whole different
kettle of fish! This was a seriously
thought provoking book mainly having to do with the ethics and reasoning
related to various social topics for their time. And as it was the ‘not-so-distant’ future, it
was like a suit that you could step into but you never get to fit just
right. There was always that smidgen of
discomfort… and maybe that is a good thing.
I don’t know.
I do know that Ms. Ellison did fill All Her Secrets with plenty of twists so
I was kept on the edge of my seat the entire time. She wrote characters who were polar – you either
loved them or you hated them without much in between. Victoria and Sam were the loveable kind. Sam could see where he’d gone wrong early on
and worked toward helping Victoria.
Victoria was pretty much an open book and easy to love. Sadly I cannot say as much for Craig. I was a little frustrated that it seemed Ms.
Ellison wrote the characters behavior as if a lot of time passed but as though
the characters themselves did not.
Victoria and Sam apparently fell in love but we really do not know that
much about Victoria and even less about Sam himself.
All in all, this was a good book that made me
think. It was a quick and easy read and
as a stand-alone novel, there are no worries about trying to connect the
missing links. I think if you like
reading about issues in society, as well as reading books that are in the
shallow end of the dystopian pond, you will enjoy reading Kate Avery Ellison’s All Her Secrets.
****4
Stars****
Thank you to NetGalley, Barclay Publicity, and
Kate Avery Ellison for the free copy of this book in exchange for a fair and
honest review.
About Kate Avery Ellison:
Kate
wishes she could live in a place where it’s always October, but until that’s
possible, she makes her home in humid Atlanta with her husband, son, and two
spoiled cats. When she isn’t dreaming up her next novel or holed up writing it
down, Kate can be found binging her favorite shows on Netflix, reading on her
Kindle, building intricate train track configurations with her toddler, and
playing board games with her husband and friends.
Virtual Blog Tour Giveaway:
Kate
Avery Ellison is offering one (1) lucky winner a $25 Amzon Gift Card and five
(5) runner-ups an eCopy of one of her books (winner’s choice)! To enter, simply
fill out the Rafflecopter below:
Ciao Bellas,
Ashley
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