نقدها
Leuk boek, maar er miste iets. Het was een beetje traag, maar definitely goed genoeg om de rest te lezen!
Solid plot but the book was soo hard to get through, the only way i got through it was through audio book
Mej slow pero i like the ensemble. Also hello namatay si hayes d ako prepared
I am probably going to write this for the entire trilogy since I read it one right after the other but HOLY GUACAMOLE! I really hope that Maureen Johnson writes more mysteries because this was only book one and already I was hooked and on the edge of my seat. The characters were so well written as well as the setting and just when you think you know what is going to happen, she throws another curveball your way. I really enjoyed the dual timeline and I felt like it added an extra layer of suspense to the story.In this book, we meet Stevie, a young girl who is accepted to the Ellingham Academy, primarily because she wants to solve a 70-year-old mystery about the kidnapping of Iris and Alice Ellingham, Albert Ellingham's wife and daughter, and the subsequent deaths of Albert and Iris. Stevie is convinced there is more to the story than many others believe and the best place to investigate will be at the Academy itself. The other characters we meet are just as amazingly developed as well - Janelle who loves STEM and making things, Nate who has already wrote a successful book at a young age but would rather be left to himself, David who can be a troublemaker and is not clear just how he ended up at the academy, Ellie who loves art, has an eccentric personality and loves to play her saxophone, Roota, and finally Hayes, who already has a successful YouTube series about zombies. After we meet the team and meet the characters back from the 1930s, the adventure truly begins. But when one of the students at the Academy is found dead, Stevie finds herself trying to solve two mysteries, one past and one present. Were certain aspects accidents or done on purpose? Is there any connection between the present and the past case? What pieces of information are actually important for Stevie to remember and investigate further and what pieces may just be there to confuse her and send her down the wrong path?This book starts out as an unsolved murder mystery at a boarding school but quickly turns into an unsolved murder mystery with current boarding school murder mysteries hopefully to be solved by a true crime aficionado! I absolutely loved every minute of reading this book. Spoiler alert: it will end on a cliffhanger that will make you want to run to the bookstore or library to get the next in the series so maybe have all three books ready to go! I liked the dual timeline because it added an extra layer and right when something is happening in the present, it flips to the past or vice versa and that just made it harder to put down.I am curious to see what is going to happen in the second book considering the cliffhanger we left off with. I also really loved reading the realness of Stevie's anxiety disorder and how it affects her throughout the book. I have gone through similar experiences but never really seen them represented so well in a book.There are some aspects and characters that I could see some readers not loving but I have a feeling that it is all written the way it is for a reason considering there are two more books. Overall, highly recommend!Quotes I loved:"It was all a scramble in her brain until she realized the blobs were a message made of cutout letters: riddle riddle on the wall. murder comes to pay a call. a body in a lonely field. will its secrets be revealed? or the lady in the lake? will she give the lucky break? alice, alice, where are you? won't you give a single clue? the detective's here. it's time to play! truly devious, lives another day" pg. 183"10/30/38 Where do you look for someone who's never really there? Always on a staircase but never on a stair" pg. 297"Either Hayes went into the workshop or he was speaking to Beth at 1:20 am., but he wasn't doing both. And the one he was most likely doing was the one someone saw him do. Which meant someone else put that dry ice in the tunnel but made it look like Hayes did it. Which sounded a lot like murder" pg. 362"The panel. Stevie had read about this. There was supposed to be some kind of passage between Ellingham's office and the ballroom, mostly used for jokes and games. It led to the basement. But apparently it was worked cleverly into the wall, not easy to see. Ellie was gone" pg. 398
-I was not expecting for Hayes to die that was a very strange occurance
-On top if that u didn't think ellie was finger to be the murderer but it kind of all adds up with her not wanting to talk to the police before
-Her and David was definitely predicted but he I also knew that he was going to end up being Edwards King son because he kept asking about it and seemed intrigued by the conversations
-I also thought rhee was something funny about those twins that were brough up in onenof the police interview transcripts in 1936 because they mentioned something about like poetry and rhen it was sonnected at the end with the box that ellie had which might mean she is related to them or something
I very rarely have the "WTF" response when I get to the end of a book, but this one had me in disbelief as my jaw dropped. Off to buy the second book...
