April 2016 Random House Children’s Books

OK, all you YA fans, listen up because this book review is for The Darkest Corners by Kara Thomas…and it’s one you’ll want to read.

The teaser line on the front cover reads, Everyone has something to hide. The truth is that everyone in this novel is hiding something, including Tessa, the main character.

When she and her friend Callie were young, they were called to testify against a man charged with killing a young woman. There had been a series of deaths in the area, all done in the same method…so they had been murdered by a serial killer.

But both Tessa and Callie harbor secrets about what they saw, and what they did later. Now their lives have supposedly moved on but both are trapped in that night and the aftermath. Until Tessa comes back to say goodbye to her dying father, who is in jail for unrelated crimes, it seems that they will continue on in that limbo, never fully living but knowing that their secret could destroy what little they have built if it comes out.

Plenty of suspects here, and Tessa is a strong young woman, so she’s not going to allow any of them to pass by without taking action. The book scored points with me on those notes. Still, I thought it would end up as at 4 stars…well written and interesting but nothing truly special.

Until I hit the part around 80% through the book. Then I went, oh, wow! I can’t tell you what happens then but it’s a twist I never saw coming. And with that, the book shot from 4 to 5 stars.

If you like books with plenty of twists and lots of elements flying around, try Reparation, in which a young man must save his sister and his new lover from a cult.

5 stars!

I was given a copy by the publisher in order to write this reviews.