Tell Me What Really Happened by Chelsea Sedoti
Genre: Mystery, Thriller, Young Adult
Pages: 416
Published By: Sourcebooks Fire on 2nd May, 2024
Format: Paperback
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Book Synopsis:
There are stories about the woods around Salvation Creek and the people who have gone missing. Now their friend is one of them. A riveting, fast-paced YA mystery told entirely through first person police interviews of four teens over the course of a few hours.
It was all her idea. They would get away from their parents and spend the weekend camping. Down by Salvation Creek, the five of them would make smores, steal kisses, share secrets.
But sometime around midnight, she vanished.
Now the four friends who came back are under suspicion―and they each have a very different story to tell about what happened in the woods.
The clock is ticking. What are they hiding? Who is lying? Dark truths must come to light if their friend is to be found…
Told entirely through first-person police interviews, this riveting mystery asks: what really happened that night?
Book Review
I had never been so excited for a book… I absolutely love YA mystery/thrillers so when I stumbled upon this in Waterstones I knew I had to pick it up. However, I am so disappointed with how much of a let down this book was. From reading the blurb, the premise is what drew me into picking this one up but it just did not deliver for me.
Now I absolutely love when a book is told in a different format to what is the typical style and this thriller is told in an 8-character interview style. For me, I really like this aspect in a mystery/thriller because you get to know the character’s behaviours and personalities very well this way. However, I didn’t really like the characters at all. All the characters were unlikeable, and maybe that was done on purpose to help move the plot along. I guess the author’s intention was for me to not like them in which case they did a good job…
Aside from that, I think the writing style being in an interview format is what helped keep the good pace of this book. Although this was the case, there were some parts of the book that seemed to drag on and go around in circles. I definitely think this book could have been shorter. I also couldn’t stand the repetitiveness of one of the characters mentioning about Bigfoot. It just seemed unnecessary in my opinion and took away from the main plot.
The nail in the coffin for the two-star review was the ending… It was anticlimactic, and I was rooting for something much more twisty instead. There was so much potential for this to be a huge reveal and it all fell flat. I’m honestly not sure why I didn’t DNF this… I guess I was hoping for the ending to redeem itself for me…
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