Blurb:
The Story family are the envy of their neighbours: Rich, beautiful and glamourous.
Until it all falls apart. The four children are suddenly dropped by their mother with a single sentence: You Know What You Did.
They never hear from her again.
Years later, when cousins Aubrey, Milly and Jonah Story receive a mysterious invitation to spend the summer at their grandmother’s resort, they have no choice but to follow their curiosity and meet the woman who’s been such an enigma their entire lives.
The teenagers are determined to discover the truth. But some secrets are better left alone…
Rating: 5/5
Side Notes:
- References to explicit language, alcohol misuse, death, and suicide
- YA novel (Recommended for 14 years and up)
- Written by the best selling author of One of Us is Lying
- Major plot twists all throughout the story
- An engaging mysterious novel
Book Quotes:
- Money. That’s all it could be. Mom’s life revolves around it – or more specifically, around not having enough of it.
- Maybe because I’m afraid the answer would be the same one she gave my Dad. not with her words, but with her actions: You aren’t enough
- I’d stay down here forever if I could
- *And I believed him without question. I believed that he was innocent, and treated unfairly, and that my grandmother must be cold, capricious, and maybe even crazy.
- But yesterday, I learned how easily he can lie. And now I don’t know what to believe anymore*
- “Everybody has secrets,’ she says, taking a sip of her drink. ‘That’s nondebatable. The only question is whether you’re keeping your own, or someone else’s.”
- “Chloe likes the happy hour game because, she says, high school boys are immature. Which is true. But sometimes I think we might be better off not knowing how much worse they can get.”
- “You gotta shoot your shot when it comes…Who knows if you’ll get another chance?”
- “Leave the past where it is”
- “It’s a little weird, maybe, to be carting all this around, but I don’t know these people. And when I don’t know something, I study it.”
- She plucks a plump blackberry from the top of a miniature tart and pops it in her mouth. The gesture is startling, like this person actually eats? I wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that she just feeds off decades-old resentment.
- I’m happier living a quiet life back home than I’ve been in years.
- “You always did refuse to see the worst in people, Archer,” Mom says.
- “I guess there are no consequences for some people, ever,”
- We see what we expect to see.
- “Nobody can stop a person who’s determined to drink from doing it.” She holds his gaze, a sad smile playing across her lips. “Perhaps not. But they can try, can’t they?”
- A lie of omission is still a lie.
- they snake their way into your heart and soul, burrowing so deep that the very idea of exposing them feels like losing a part of yourself.
- I got to the island what my relationship with Thomas really is: something that should’ve ended a few months after it began in eighth grade, when he started treating me like an afterthought.
- There’s just something comforting about knowing that I could.
- What happens to you after that isn’t our problem.
- That feels like the poisonous apple in “Snow White”; a gift given with malice that I’ll instantly regret accepting.
- So why does it still hurt that I can’t have it?
- I probably shouldn’t have said as much as I did, so now seems like a good time to cut my losses and run.
- I don’t know how to see beyond it, yet, but I want to try.
- The thought leaves me feeling empty and unsettled, like I’ve lost something before I even knew I had it.
- This summer keeps twisting in ways I never expected, and it’s a relief to have them along for the ride.
- It’s death by a thousand cuts, and even though I told my parents I wanted them to keep me in the loop, I’m starting to wish they’d spare me the details.
- Shit doesn’t happen unless it’s stirred.
- It almost seems inevitable, like there’s not a single thing in my formerly comfortable, predictable life that gets to stay the way it used to be.
- I can’t untell the truth once it’s out.
- “Bottom line is, nobody’s ever gonna care as much about your own money as you do.”
- Things happen to him, like they’re out of his control. But that’s not how life really works; or at least, it’s not how it’s ever worked for him.
- Part of her wanted to keep reminiscing, but she’d learned over the past few months that you could only stay so far ahead of grief.
- It’s turned her into the kind of person who keeps everybody at a distance