Thanks to NetGalley and Macmillan Audio for the ARC. It hasn’t affected the content of my review.
Don’t go in expecting another thriller like Ace of Spades and you’ll be fine. This is more of a straight mystery than Íyímídé’s debut; it is slower paced and there is both more passing of actual time in the story, and time spent with characters just talking to each other. In a way, it’s a lot more atmospheric than Ace of Spades. It sort of traded in the propulsive speedy plot for something more considered and setting focused. Her school, Alfred Nobel Academy, feels like it was a lot of fun to create, and the elaborate school politics and a student body full of rich kids and scholarship kids is the perfect place to tell a story like this one.
Our main character is Sade Hussein, orphan, whose father just died weeks before she enters a prestigious English boarding school. She has been homeschooled her entire life, and her childhood was marked by multiple tragedies. Right away there’s a sense that she is at the school for a purpose, even if it’s just to try on independence for the first time (her father never would have let her come). But this is a narration style, that while pretty close, does keep some things back from the reader, and the result of that is that we often see Sade doing things without explanation that we wonder about. I thought it was very clever. The prose, while nothing stunning, does its job, and I was liking the characters I was supposed to like within about fifty pages. This is quite a long book for YA, but it reads pretty fast.
The audiobook narration of this was great. Natalie Simpson did a wonderful job, and I would be more likely to check out a book if I saw she had narrated it.
Even though I liked this book slightly less than her debut, I will definitely read more of this author’s stuff. What’s she’s doing with YA is super interesting, and I’m still super interested to see what kinds of books she starts coming out with as a more seasoned author.