All Your Twisted Secrets, Diana Urban | Book Review

My first thought when I read the synopsis for All Your Twisted Secrets? That it sounded a lot like One of us is Lying, which I read in one sitting, so yes, yes I very much wanted to read this book.

All Your Twisted Secrets, Diana Urban

Themes: Mystery, Thriller, Contemporary, Young Adult

Reading Format: Paperback

5 STARS

Thank you to Harper 360 for sending me a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. 

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When you get offered a book with all school stereotypes trapped in a room with the task to kill one person by the end of an hour, you read it. When you find out there’s a mystery behind it, you read it even faster. I read 300 pages of this book in one day. It was fantastic, go and place an order.

I went into this ready for the blazing stereotypes, the predictable characters and dialogue. I expected this because of the blurb, so I wasn’t surprised to read about the characters who were so loyal to the ‘highschool stereotypes’ it hurt. But I mean this in the very best way because this book is all about the people, the roles they play in each other’s lives and how they interact with each other. So whilst they may be their own stereotypes, we get to find out more about them and what drives them.

I really like that Amber, the narrator, is a classical music composer and loves film scores. She regularly references what she is listening to in her headphones and I often know the piece of music she means. This story follows her path and how each other character stuck in the room comes into contact with her. The structure is very clever, alternating between being set in the present day with the impending threat and then a year prior so we can see how everyone came to be where they are. This works very well with the suspense of the book, every other chapter ends on a cliffhanger, which makes it a very hard book to put down!

This deals with the question of killing one person to save many, an often debated topic. The students must decide between them what is morally right in this situation and make a decision to either all day or become murders themselves and kill one person. It’s never something I’d like to think about, but I’m sure would be an impossibly hard decision to make. This message this book tries to deliver is that everyone is valuable in some way, it might just not be as obvious as others.

Overall, I found this book exciting and full of cliffhangers. I loved it and I felt totally engrossed the whole way through, if you want to pick up a copy, you can order it via either Amazon or Waterstones.