They All Fall Down by Roxanne St. Claire

Not gonna lie, I fully expected this book to be terrible.

Oh come on, the description was so blatantly riding on the coattails of Pretty Little Liars. So why did I read it? Well, I'm a sucker for a good mystery and I was secretly hoping this book would do what PLL failed to-create a good mystery with interesting characters.

This book sucked me in instantly. For the first half I couldn't put it down. Instead of having the main girl be your typical popular girl like in PLL, the author opted to have a more average nerdy girl voted onto the list. This certainly helped with making the character likeable and the narration more bearable. The other characters were less interesting but the only one I hated was Kenzie's friend. She was your typical jealous friend type who only seemed to exist solely to create drama and screw up the plot.

The second half of this book though...oh god, it was hard to swallow. I'm going to keep this review spoiler free so all I'll say is that the resolution to the mystery was not what I wanted at all. It was very original I'll give it that but still, it wasn't the kind of genre I normally read. Thankfully the writing was good enough to save it...just.

One thing I did like is that the main character's stupidly reckless behaviour was somewhat excused by her paranoid and scared-of-life mother. It might not have worked 100% but it was a nice touch and much better than just having the main character act like an idiot for no reason.

On the whole, They All Fall Down is a curious one. It isn't the horror I wanted nor the kind of murder mystery I like but it was enjoyable enough and much, much better than I thought it would be. Pretty Little Liars it isn't and it's almost a shame it's been marketed this way. It's a good book but I feel a lot of people will be disappointed with how it plays out based on the blurb.

Overall Score:

.5