Content Warnings: depression, death, suicidal ideation, violence, abuse, controlling behaviour, manipulation, grief, PTSD

I received an eARC of this for review, it has not affected my honest opinion.

I'm a big fan of YA thrillers, but this just didn't work for me. I finished reading it rather than DNFing because I was hoping it might pick up nearer the end but ultimately it just left me frustrated and a bit irritated. Okay, a lot irritated. The whole way through the stakes felt extremely low, and despite it being marketed as someone using their phobias against them, they were all able to get away from it really easily. There was just no real threat level the whole way through. I didn't feel any sense of dread or any real anticipation. The only time it felt like there was real danger was when the brothers were on the island - an entire section that made basically no sense. Their motivations for being there were so flimsy and didn't click with me at all. As for the emotional abuse, I can understand where the book was trying to lead me but I felt like I was expected to pity an abuser because they went through trauma? I'm sorry, it just didn't work for me. I need to see a lot more development and a lot more awareness and apology from a character to feel pity - and definitely not after the actions taken during this book. Ultimately I just found the ending underwhelming. I really need people to stop using mental illness as a twist. 'Mentally ill person commits crime' is not the mind-blowing and innovative twist you think it is.

EDIT: I'm adding to this review like 10 mins after posting it because I'm getting increasingly angry. I also wanna add I think this was mismarketed?? I'm gonna spoiler tag the next bit while I explain why.

Spoiler

So this has IN THE DESCRIPTION 'who will make it off the island alive?' the answer? all of them, because there was NEVER ANY THREAT. Don't market a book as if people are going to die and then hit me with 'it was all a hallucination', tf? I felt so disappointed because I was waiting for this to hold up to the hunger games comp and the THREAT OF DEATH and instead it was literally so low stakes i was bored the whole time.