Please note that I received this book via NetGalley. This did not affect my rating or review.
Hey, I am always going to be down for a homage to “And Then There Were None.” The author, Cindy R.X. He I think does a great job of turning this into a young adult version but with a contemporary spin that really does work. The only reason that it didn’t get 5 stars for me and received just 4 is that I think the jumping back and forth to the terrible secret the 6 teens shared was killing the momentum of the story in the present. I think I would have liked it better if the author had waited until the very end to reveal what happened in the past to bring the teens to this moment. Also, with six characters and all of them told in first person point of view, it just maybe would have been stronger told third person point of view. That’s just a personal preference for me since I think that this book was really really strong.
“This is Where We Die” follows 6 teens: Sadie, Will, Isla, Anthony, Emily, and Charlie. We see that an event happens (we don’t get details) that changes the 6 characters to the point that they barely function as a group anymore. On their graduation day they get the opportunity to go to an isolated island and stay in a fantastic house staffed with people, food, and drink. We quickly find out that Sadie is the rich one in the group and she has the means to rent the island and house and when the group has the ability to take a helicopter a day earlier than the rest of their group of 21 they do so. They quickly realize though something is wrong and then they all start to get picked off one by one.
I thought that the six characters were developed very well. Everyone’s “voices” felt very distinct to me. I thought that the shifting perspectives though does not allow you to get into anyone’s heads too long though which I think we needed a bit more of in some parts.
I already mentioned flow above when I said that showing the present and jumping back to the secret just hampered things after a while. I wanted to stay in the present and figure out what was going on.
The setting of the island and murders definitely set the right atmosphere.
When everything is revealed and the why behind it all, I thought it was really great. I also loved the little messages we got at the end of the chapters which were supposed to show I think message boards or chats and I thought that was a nice touch. Most true crime enthusiasts would be all over this if this was a true story, so I thought that was a nice add.