Review: All Fall Down

ALL FALL DOWN
Embassy Row #1
Ally Carter
Contemporary Young Adult
320 pages
Scholastic
Available Now
Source: Finished copy from publisher for review

THE STORY (from Amazon)
Grace Blakely is absolutely certain of three things:

1. She is not crazy.
2. Her mother was murdered.
3. Someday she is going to find the killer and make him pay.

As certain as Grace is about these facts, nobody else believes her -- so there's no one she can completely trust. Not her grandfather, a powerful ambassador. Not her new friends, who all live on Embassy Row. Not Alexei, the Russian boy next door, who is keeping his eye on Grace for reasons she neither likes nor understands.

Everybody wants Grace to put on a pretty dress and a pretty smile, blocking out all her unpretty thoughts. But they can't control Grace -- no more than Grace can control what she knows or what she needs to do. Her past has come back to hunt her . . . and if she doesn't stop it, Grace isn't the only one who will get hurt. Because on Embassy Row, the countries of the world stand like dominoes, and one wrong move can make them all fall down.

MY THOUGHTS
All Fall Down is pure entertainment, the kind of book perfect for picking up after a long day and letting ourselves settle into as we escape reality for a while. Grace’s story does require the suspension of disbelief and the capacity to go with the flow as she follows possible assassins down dark tunnels with absolutely no backup, but this story is in no way meant to be a serious behavioral examination of the children of prominent politicians. Instead, it's a story full of murder plots and power exchanges–with a bit of humor mixed in–and it ensures we keep the pages turning well into the early hours of the morning.

Grace is someone whose sorrow is a tangible thing, the death of her mother three years prior and the fact that she witnessed it something that haunts her hours both waking and not. She’s not in an overly healthy place when we meet her, reciting a mantra of “I’m fine” to anyone who asks, but what keeps those two words from being frustrating is the fact that Grace herself doesn’t believe them any more than those on the receiving end of it do. She knows she’s struggling, but her fear of being forced back into a hospital and heavily medicated forces her to put on the bravest face she can, and we can’t help but hope her desire to pull it together will eventually make it so.

Even though Grace is weighed down heavily by her mother’s murder and the fact that no one believes what she saw that night, the story itself doesn’t feel overwhelmingly sad, and we move forward quickly and easily with Grace as she tries to extract the truth from both past and present. We’re left with the full reveal of exactly what happened the night of Grace’s mother’s death, but it’s also very clear that things are just beginning and everything we thought we knew after spending a few hundred pages in Grace’s world is going to be called into question moving forward.

Rating: 4/5

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This book was sent to me by the publisher free of charge for the purpose of a review. 

I received no other compensation and the above is my honest opinion.