This book was so terrible. I went into it expecting a thriller about six friends revealing their darkest secrets; Instead got almost five hundred pages of terrible dialogue, annoying characters and non-consistent, along with terrible plot twists. I was so close to DNFing this book about three times but chose not to because I wanted to know how it would all play out. What. A. Mistake.
(((spoilers ahead)))


Things I liked:

-The premise was really intriguing (which makes the terribleness of this book even worse).
- Priya - up until the ending- was the only character I could stand. Even the main character was aggravating.
That’s it.

Things I didn’t like:

-The terrible dialogue: By reading the dialogue alone, you would think that these characters were eight, not eighteen. Some of my favorites:

[Context: Amber is trying to convince Sasha to let her score the school play]
“She said no!” said Maria.
“Well, who the hell made her queen of the universe?”
Everyone precedes to laugh even though she didn’t say anything funny??? Ok.

[Context: Amber is talking to her boyfriend, who she describes as a dork in a jock’s body(we’ll get to that later)]
“I guess you can be a freak if I can be a weirdo.” barf.
Throughout the entire book, the dialogue is weirdly juvenile and unrealistic. It was unbearable at times.

-Bad similes: While this was less of an issue than the dialogue, it was still tiresome to read. At several points, there are similes that either don’t make sense or are just stupid. For example:

[Context: Amber thinks that Diego saw the alcohol she’s sneaking into the school dance]
“My heart raced like a wild stallion escaping its captor” ??? It feels extremely out of place and doesn’t entirely make sense.

[Context: Amber is considering what will happen if her parents find out that she stole from their alcohol cabinet]
“Going through life without music was like breathing air with oxygen” Is air,,, not,,, oxygen??? I get the idea but this was such a weird way to phrase it.

-Inconsistent characters (major spoilers below): The chapters in this book are divided; every other chapter either takes place in the room with the bomb or in the months leading up to the event (which really ruins the pacing, but I digress!). The main issue with this was that when we read about something that happened two weeks before, it wouldn’t affect the story until the chapter after we learned it. For example, in a chapter two weeks before the party, we learn that Sasha’s sister* was the one who bullied Amber’s sister Maggie, causing her death. At the beginning of the book, though, Amber is all buddy-buddy with Sasha, like none of this ever happened. Also, Amber is very distraught over Maggie’s death by bullying, yet when she discovers that Sasha is bullying her best friend (and practically everyone else in the school), she rationalizes everything and doesn’t take action.

-The pacing: The pacing of this book was terrible. Someone in the room would try to stab someone with the syringe, then it would cut to Amber and Robbie eating lunch last year. I don’t care! If you’re going to take me away from the action, at least show me something interesting! The scenes at the party got very dull; With 30 minutes left on the bomb, they were still arguing about whether it was real. Who cares! Pick somebody! There was lots of fluff, lots of attempts to pad out the runtime by someone alluding to someone else’s secret, then the other person lunging at them with the syringe (it happened at least twice).

-The characters as a whole: Every single one of these characters annoyed me. Diana Urban doesn’t seem to understand that characters can have multifaceted personalities, so every character felt like a caricature of a “typical high school” (this is reinforced in the dialogue, with Amber constantly referring to her boyfriend as “the jock” and her “the nerd/orchestra geek”, or categorizing every boy in the grade as either a “preppy jock” or “über dork”.). The thing that made me the most upset though, was that Priya took Amber back as a friend. Even after Amber revealed that she was the one behind the entire party (the party in which Priya stabbed and killed her classmate so she wouldn’t kill Amber), she still wanted to be friends. She doesn’t blame Amber because “she didn’t have bad intentions”. What...

-The plot twist: There were two major plot twists: That Sasha was the one who bullied Maggie to death, and that Amber orchestra the dinner party. The first one was kind of interesting, but the second was terrible. It felt completely out of nowhere like they put it purely for shock value. There were no clues throughout the book that hinted towards this twist; it felt like she put all of the characters' names in a hat and picked one. Her reasoning was so half-assed and nonsensical it made me legitimately upset. Why did I spend so much time on this book!

-The ending (finally): The ending was the worst part. Priya and Diego forgive Amber even though she caused someone’s death, and Amber monologues about how easy it would be to keep her deception a secret, but she’s a “better person” than Sasha so she turns herself in to the police:

“Now I couldn’t be selfish anymore. No matter how hard it would be, no matter how much trouble I’d be in, I had to do the right thing. I had to face the music even if it meant I never write music again. Even if it meant giving up my spot at USC. Even if it meant I’d never see my dreams come true. And hopefully someday I’d learn to forgive myself. But that would take a hell of a lot longer than an hour.”

Why is she acting like she’s so brave for turning herself in after committing a crime? Beats me!

Overall, this book was long, boring, and the opposite of a thriller. One star.