Twenty years after their parents were disowned by their wealthy mother, three cousins are invited to the island where their grandmother lives to work for a summer. Their parents have no idea why they were disowned; they only received a note from their mother's lawyer, saying "You know what you did." The blurb of this book was extremely compelling to me. What could turn a mother's love into such hate that she never wanted to see her children again? That was enough to make me pick up this book and read it.
The author keeps on switching between the perspectives of the three cousins, giving us a glimpse into their troubled inner lives, and how everything ties up to their parents, the Story siblings, each with a characteristic flaw. The Story family is indeed flawed, secretive, mysterious, everything the author wanted us to believe. The cousins are very well written as characters too, but unfortunately, this lovely character development failed to keep me interested in the plot.
In the beginning, there was one plot twist that surprised me, but I found the rest of the story simply underwhelming. Although the plot twists were unpredictable and yet credible, which are marks of good plot twists, the shock factor was nonexistent for me. Once everything was revealed at the end, I couldn't help but feel disappointed. Sometimes it felt like there wasn't much of a substantial story to be told in terms of the main plot. I am not trying to imply that you need a lot of gore, or a very fast-moving plot to write an engaging mystery; I have read several very skilfully written thrillers which were relatively slow, but I thought this story left a lot to be desired. Some of the subplots felt gratuitous to me. They were entertaining to read and were relevant and linked into the main plot, but I often felt that the story could have easily proceeded without them.
Despite all my criticism towards this book, I thought that Karen M. McManus has a lovely style of writing. Despite not liking the way the book ended, at no point did I feel like I wanted to stop reading; I wanted to read right to the end to know everything. The author has a lot of potential, and I certainly want to read her other books, because I am almost entirely convinced that I might like the other ones better.
Everything being said, I would recommend this book if you are a fan of suspense but do not want to deal with gore. One reason why I didn't enjoy this book a lot is probably because I have been reading too many, extremely graphic thrillers lately, and they might have reduced my attention span for slightly slower books. But who knows? This book may just be your cup of tea.
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