Blog Tour – You’ll Be The Death Of Me

Hello hello and welcome or welcome to my little bookish corner of the internet. I’ve got a real treat for you today, in the form of my review of the latest book by Karen M. McManus, one of my favourite authors: You’ll Be The Death Of Me. Just this time last year, we were reading and reviewing The Cousins, so I think we should all bow down in thanks for the books we’re being given access to so regularly. A big thank you to The Write Reads for organising as always, and a huge thank you to Penguin for sending me the physical ARC of the book, which I will treasure always.

Synopsis
Ivy, Mateo, and Cal used to be close. Now all they have in common is Carlton High and the beginning of a very bad day.
Type A Ivy lost a student council election to the class clown, and now she has to face the school, humiliated. Heartthrob Mateo is burned out–he’s been working two jobs since his family’s business failed. And outsider Cal just got stood up…. again.
So when Cal pulls into campus late for class and runs into Ivy and Mateo, it seems like the perfect opportunity to turn a bad day around. They’ll ditch and go into the city. Just the three of them, like old times. Except they’ve barely left the parking lot before they run out of things to say…
Until they spot another Carlton High student skipping school–and follow him to the scene of his own murder. In one chance move, their day turns from dull to deadly. And it’s about to get worse.
It turns out Ivy, Mateo, and Cal still have some things in common. They all have a connection to the dead kid. And they’re all hiding something.
Now they’re all wondering–could it be that their chance reconnection wasn’t by chance after all?

From the author of One of Us Is Lying comes a brand-new pulse-pounding thriller. It’s Ferris Bueller’s Day Off with murder when three old friends relive an epic ditch day, and it goes horribly–and fatally–wrong.

Review
I Tweeted when I’d finished the book that “She’s done it again! Another absolutely incredible ride with a mystery that didn’t stop and emotional threads that kept tugging. Genius”, and I meant every word. McManus is an auto-buy author for me anyway, but the excitment of having one of her books in my hand is something I will never get tired of, because if writing young adult thrillers is a superpower, McManus is Superwoman.

The twists and turns are plentiful, and even though I seem to have read every young adult thriller on the market by this point in time, I didn’t see them coming. I had no idea what was going on, right up to the very end. As always, McManus blew me away with her writing, and the characters she has created jumped right off the page and into the room in front of me. They were so vivid, loveable and imperfect; exactly how characters should be.

It wasn’t that the characters were predictable, but that you felt you knew them so well that their actions became second nature to understand. Mateo’s fierce protectiveness, Ivy’s fear of failure, Cal’s desperartion to be loved… It all made sense almost from page one. Charactization is something that McManus always perfects, and this book was no different.

As the story moves along, all the moving pieces shift around in movements that are so perfected, they’re almost dance-like. I read the second half of the book in one sitting, finishing it at 2am, and then sitting there, open mouthed, needing someone to talk the story through with immediately. I might have finished at 2am, but I certainly wasn’t asleep until 3am because I just had my brain spinning. And I am not complaining for one moment!

Once again, a huge thank you to Penguin and The Write Reads for all their hard work, and for allowing me to be a part of this brilliant tour. I know McManus has already announced her next two upcoming books via social media, and knowing what’s coming up makes it all even more exciting to be writing this.