All Your Twisted Secrets by Diana Urban

All Your Twisted Secrets

Author: Diana Urban

Publisher: Harper Teen, 2020

Genres: Young Adult, Mystery, Thriller

Format: Hardcover

Page Count: 396

My Rating: 4 stars

I feel that anything that's described as 'The Breakfast Club' will grab by attention and interest, so it comes to no surprise that I loved 'All Your Twisted Secrets' by Diana Urban.

Synopsis

Welcome to dinner, and again, congratulations on being selected. Now you must do the selecting.

What do the queen bee, star athlete, valedictorian, stoner, loner, and music geek all have in common? They were all invited to a scholarship dinner, only to discover it’s a trap. Someone has locked them into a room with a bomb, a syringe filled with poison, and a note saying they have an hour to pick someone to kill … or else everyone dies.

Amber Prescott is determined to get her classmates and herself out of the room alive, but that might be easier said than done. No one knows how they’re all connected or who would want them dead. As they retrace the events over the past year that might have triggered their captor’s ultimatum, it becomes clear that everyone is hiding something. And with the clock ticking down, confusion turns into fear, and fear morphs into panic as they race to answer the biggest question: Who will they choose to die?

There's just something about clichéd and recycled tropes that I absolutely love. All Your Twisted Secrets centers on a group of six high school students who are invited to a scholarship dinner, but they immediately realise that something isn't quite right. Where are the scholarship heads? Turns out, it was all a trap to lure them into a room for an hour to decide which one of them dies. That, or they all do.

Sounds great, doesn't it? Well, to me it does.

The book is told in our protagonist Amber's POV. All Amber wants to do is graduate high school and attend USC for musical composition. Amber, as a character, is completely original (There wasn't a Musical Prodigy in The Breakfast Club, was there?), so you immediately want to get to know her and her life. The rest of the characters each fall into stereotypical 'Breakfast Club' archetypes. Amber's ex-bff Priya is the loner, whilst her new bff Sasha is the queen bee. Robbie, Amber's boyfriend, is the jock, her secret crush Diego is the nerd, and her childhood pal Scott is the stoner. But what Urban immediately does is make these archetypes a tad different, which allows us to sympathise with them and see past their stereotype mold. Well, most of them. I mean, yes they're stereotypes. But I LOVE stereotypes! So I loved these characters.

I have to say, I adored the high school drama aspects. Whilst most people would think they are overused and cliché, I love them. This aspect of the book reminds me so much of shows like One Tree Hill. Bitchy cheerleaders, falling in love with popular jocks, fighting with best friends, they are all there. But it also explores the fear of hurting and leaving the people you love to follow your dreams. Give me these tropes any day!

What I also loved was how Urban threaded together past and present timelines. It allowed us to learn who these characters were before the present scenario affected them. The flashback scenes weren't just explored for the sake of it. They were exactly where they were meant to be in order to effectively reveal the secrets that were being spilled.

I also have to say that the setting of the locked room was so beautifully claustrophobic, you could feel the characters anxiety and desperate need to escape. Because of this, reading every last page was suspenseful and heart-pounding, where you just had to know what happens.

I would have loved this book even more if there were alternating POV's. Amber was an effective and reliable narrator, but I would have loved to hear from the other characters, just to see what they were thinking in the stressful scenario they were in. It worked for Karen M. McManus' One Of Us Is Lying. It would have worked here, too. 

A solid YA Contemporary/YA Thriller that includes all the stereotypical tropes and archetypes that I absolutely love, all put into a tense and claustrophobic setting for a fast-paced, suspenseful read. 

A salted caramel mocha is definitely needed for this read. A sticky and sweet beverage to get you through the tension and thrills.