Thank you William Morrow, #partner, for the finished copy of Tell Us No Secrets in exchange for my honest review. I borrowed the audiobook from the library.
Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks / Harper Audio
Published: June 7, 2022
Summary:
This stunning debut thriller, set in a girls’ boarding school, will leave you breathless until the final minute.
Sometimes girls are the meanest of them all…
Female friendship is intense and that intensity can erupt into dangerous passions when teenage girls are cooped up in an exclusive East Coast boarding school.
Beautiful, streetwise Cassidy Thomas; debutante jock Abby Madison; academic, sensitive Karen Mullens; and sophisticated troublemaking Zoey Spalding are four seventeen-year-olds who should be cruising happily through their Senior Year. But jealousies are simmering. And when Zoey plays a game with the class list—if you lose your virginity you get a star beside your name—it sets in motion a chain of shocking events.
Nine months later, when one of the girls is murdered, the others must ask themselves if they can carry the truth of what happened the rest of their lives.
Tell Us No Secrets describes the bonds between these adolescent girls as well as the terrible pain of betrayal and the tragic consequences of peer pressure running riot at a time when the seismic shift of the Sixties changed the rules for everyone.
My thoughts:
There is nothing I love more than getting my hands on a debut thriller…that anticipation of seeing a new writer in a market that is so saturated with standouts and seeing how they will fare. I think Siena Sterling definitely has written a solid psychological thriller here and I will be eager to see what comes next from her.
One of my favorite settings within the thriller genre is the boarding school setting. While I didn’t go to one myself, I just love that dark academia setting to be so perfect to explore for a psychological thriller and let me tell you, Siena Sterling gives us toxic friendships and that whole “Mean Girl” mentality to the extreme! Boy, I’m definitely glad I didn’t know there girls…or have anything like this happen at my school!
This book was good, albeit a little slow for my liking. I loved the twists that ultimately happened, however it does take a while to finally get there. The dual time line definitely kept my interest and the character development was good, but I think the story could have been tightened up a bit. However, that last line was perfection!
I did enjoy this one and I will certainly be checking out the author’s next book. I think her writing style is quite engaging. This is one to add to your summer reading – it’s definitely a great beach read!
Audio thoughts:
This was a good one to listen to…Cindy Kay did a fantastic job narrating it, giving all the characters their own personalities and distinct voices. Yes, it’s a bit long, but I found myself engaged and eager to get to the end where we finally get the resolution.
