by Ally Carter
Scholastic, 2015. 310 pages. Young adult fiction.
Grace hasn't been back to her grandfather's embassy in Adria since she saw her mother killed three years previously. Haunted by memories of her mother and the Scarred Man who killed her, Grace is on a mission to find out what really happened that night and make the criminal pay for his actions. With the help of her new friends on Embassy Row, Grace finally has a chance of succeeding. But will she be able to handle the information she finds?
Unlike most Ally Carter series, which start out light and get more intense as the series goes on, this one throws you right in the deep end. Grace is very emotionally disturbed by her experiences and the book leaves you guessing right until the end whether she really saw the Scarred Man kill her mother or whether this is all the product of a disturbed mind. The book was gripping and intriguing and I am fascinated to see where she goes with the sequel (and would really like to be able to start reading it tomorrow!).
JH
1 comment:
Unlike JH, I did not enjoy All Fall Down. I feel like Ally Carter comes up with these cute and fun YA story concepts that end up going to darker places than I want. Perhaps I got the wrong impression with her first novel, I’d Tell You I Love You But Then I’d Have to Kill You. It was such a fun story about a private girl’s school that is really a secret training school for spies. However, I eventually gave up on the series after the main focus turned to Cam’s mental trauma after being kidnapped.
With All Fall Down, centered around the teenage kids of ambassadors, I felt that the author fell back on certain annoying tropes to keep the plot mysterious such as no one ever actually communicating. Perhaps if my expectations were different, I would have enjoyed the story more, but I just wasn’t interested in where this book took me.
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