Review: The Darkest Corners

*I signed up for this tour date prior to implementing my new no-Mondays rule, so next week will be the week I drop down to 4 posts!

THE DARKEST CORNERS
Kara Thomas
Young Adult/Thriller
336 pages
Delacorte
Available April 19th
Source: eARC from publisher for review

THE STORY (from Goodreads)
The Darkest Corners is a psychological thriller about the lies little girls tell, and the deadly truths those lies become.
 
There are ghosts around every corner in Fayette, Pennsylvania. Tessa left when she was nine and has been trying ever since not to think about it after what happened there that last summer. Memories of things so dark will burn themselves into your mind if you let them.
 
Callie never left. She moved to another house, so she doesn’t have to walk those same halls, but then Callie always was the stronger one. She can handle staring into the faces of her demons—and if she parties hard enough, maybe one day they’ll disappear for good.
 
Tessa and Callie have never talked about what they saw that night. After the trial, Callie drifted and Tessa moved, and childhood friends just have a way of losing touch.
 
But ever since she left, Tessa has had questions. Things have never quite added up. And now she has to go back to Fayette—to Wyatt Stokes, sitting on death row; to Lori Cawley, Callie’s dead cousin; and to the one other person who may be hiding the truth.
 
Only the closer Tessa gets to the truth, the closer she gets to a killer—and this time, it won’t be so easy to run away.

MY THOUGHTS
Young Adult thrillers can sometimes be tricky reads (particularly for older readers like myself) due in large part to a general premise wherein teenagers assume responsibility for solving a crime without the help of the law, thereby stretching plausibility so incredibly thin that it can be hard to settle into the story. The Darkest Corners, however, succeeds where so many others have faltered, giving us a pair of young girls who seek to uncover the truth in an entirely believable way while simultaneously weaving together several crimes so there's rarely a moment we're not kept on our toes.

While Tessa and Callie do don their super-sleuth hats and set out to discover what really happened to Callie's cousin over a decade ago, their reasons for not immediately turning to the police with their suspicions are completely valid given it was their dual testimony that guaranteed the alleged killer's death penalty sentence. Recanting their testimonies would not only be admitting to perjury, but it would also give a man who arguably still belongs behind bars despite being innocent of the murders a chance at freedom.

With one small exception, Tessa and Callie don't run off half-cocked with grand ideas about how to track down and expose the true killer, instead their search is quieter and more personal, involving a great deal of research and talking to various people who at some point or another knew Tessa's wayward mother and sister (a friend of Callie's late cousin). What's slowly and fascinatingly revealed through each interaction adds a new brushstroke to the painting of what happened that night so long ago, a picture that's far more complex than two little nine year-old girls coerced into providing a false identification could have possibly imagined.

Overall, The Darkest Corners is a well-executed psychological thriller, one that keeps us questioning throughout but gives us all the answers we could have hoped for in the end.

Rating: 4/5

Find The Darkest Corners:

Amazon • B&N • Goodreads • Official Website

• • • • • • • • • • • • • • •

KARA THOMAS

Kara is the author of THE DARKEST CORNERS, coming from Penguin Random House/Delacorte Press in Spring 2016. She also wrote the Prep School Confidential series (St. Martin’s Press) and the pilot The Revengers for the CW under the pen name Kara Taylor. She’s represented by Suzie Townsend of New Leaf Literary & Media for books and United Talent Agency and Brillstein Entertainment Partners for film. You can find her on Twitter, Instagram, or on the couch with her rescue cat, Felix.

Website • Facebook • Twitter

 

Be sure and check out all the stops on the tour for more reviews!

3/14 Fresh Fiction

3/15 Jessabella Reads

3/16 Book Addict Confessions

3/17 Hollywood News Source

3/18 Undeniably (Book) Nerdy

3/19 Curling Up with a Good Book

3/20 Out of Time

3/21 Supernatural Snark

3/22 Live to Read, review

3/23 Dark Faerie Tales

3/24 Ex Libris

3/25 Reading with Cupcakes

3/26 The Reader Bee

3/27 The Eater of Books!

3/28 Reading Teen

3/29 Chapter by Chapter

3/30 Winter Haven Books

3/31 Once Upon A Twilight

4/1 Intellectual Recreation

4/2 The Hiding Spot

4/3 Carina Books

4/4 Cover Contessa

4/5 Me Read A Lot

4/6 The Writer Diaries

4/7 Whimsically Yours

4/8 Hook of a Book

4/9 Reading Nook Reviews

4/10 Downright Dystopian

4/11 Such A Novel Idea

4/12 Across the Words

4/13 Reviews From a Bookworm

4/14 Itching For Books

4/15 Waste Paper Prose

4/16 The Irish Banana

4/17 The Book Rat

4/18 YA Reads

4/19 No BS Book Review

4/20 Serenity’s Lovely Reads

4/21 Pandora’s Books

Interview: Melissa Grey + The Girl at Midnight

I have the distinct pleasure today of welcoming author Melissa Grey to the blog to answer a few questions about her newest YA fantasy release, The Girl at Midnight. I absolutely LOVED this book, I've been on a fantasy binge for about a year now and this one was everything I could have hoped for (mini review below the interview!). If you guys haven't devoured it yet, I highly recommend it. *attempts to wait patiently for book 2*

To introduce Echo, Caius, Ivy, Dorian and Jasper to those who have not yet had the chance to meet them, please assign each of them a high school-style superlative (best hair, most likely to succeed, etc.).

Echo: Most Likely to Steal the Declaration of Independence

Ivy: Most Likely to Try to Talk Echo Out of Stealing the Declaration of Independence

Caius: Most Likely to Succeed in Winning a Throne But Maybe Not the Best at Keeping It

Dorian: Most Likely to Fall for Someone He Really Shouldn’t

Jasper: Best Hair, Best Eyes, Best Everything

In many ways the colors of an Avicen’s feathers matches their individual personality traits (I’m looking at you Jasper!). If you were Avicen, what color would your plumage be?

Easy. Purple! Like my current hair color.

While we don’t get to see too much of her in this first book, what we do get to see of Tanith has us gritting our teeth and curling our fingers into fists. What would you say are three characteristics that always make for a good villain?

Conviction, cunning, and ferocity. Battling someone who is convinced they’re in the right even when they’re obviously not is pretty daunting.

We get to spend time with a few different characters in The Girl at Midnight. What’s one book written from a single point of view that you wish allowed you into the head of one or more secondary characters?

The Archived and The Unbound by Victoria Schwab. There are so many mysteries in those books that I just want to role around in the PoVs forever. She wrote a story from the point of view of Wesley Ayers (also known as my current book boyfriend) and I’m still haunted by it. I need more. Do you hear that, Victoria? I need more.

Echo and company follow a trail of rhyming clues as they track down the elusive firebird. Looking forward to the next book, could you give us a short rhyme with a hint or two of what awaits?

Magic, and mayhem, and murder, oh my!
Can people stop fighting so Echo can have pie?
Wherever there is darkness, there must also be light,
But will it be bright enough to beat back the blight?

Thanks so much for taking the time to answer my questions Melissa!

• • • • • • • • • • • 

THE GIRL AT MIDNIGHT

Beneath the streets of New York City live the Avicen, an ancient race of people with feathers for hair and magic running through their veins. Age-old enchantments keep them hidden from humans. All but one. Echo is a runaway pickpocket who survives by selling stolen treasures on the black market, and the Avicen are the only family she's ever known.

Echo is clever and daring, and at times she can be brash, but above all else she's fiercely loyal. So when a centuries-old war crests on the borders of her home, she decides it's time to act.

Legend has it that there is a way to end the conflict once and for all: find the Firebird, a mythical entity believed to possess power the likes of which the world has never seen. It will be no easy task, though if life as a thief has taught Echo anything, it's how to hunt down what she wants . . . and how to take it.

But some jobs aren't as straightforward as they seem. And this one might just set the world on fire.

MINI REVIEW

The Girl at Midnight is the perfect blend of fantastical adventure and forbidden romance, complete with a stunning cast of secondary characters who all shine in their various shades of gray. We get to spend time with a group of five young men and women, each with layers to their personality we can't wait to peel back and examine more closely as we're carried along with them in their attempt to locate the mythical firebird. The relationships of every individual to each of the others are fraught with tension for a wide array of reasons, and where a larger cast sometimes opens the door for us to pick favorites, each member of the firebird search party earns themselves a special place in our hearts.

Echo and Caius are the two with whom we spend majority of our time, both out of place in their respective worlds and looking for a way to close the gap between the long-feuding Avicen and Drakharin. Theirs is a romance that takes chapter upon chapter to build, two opposing sides uniting in a shared purpose who eventually find their minds and hearts filled with more than just a desire for peace. While things are likely to get more complicated rather than less as their story continues, they're a couple easy to root for in this first installment.

The only minor complaint is with a slightly jumbled ending, the chaos of the final battle cut off quickly in the heat of the moment before we suddenly find ourselves on the final page. Overall though, The Girl at Midnight has humor and romance (on a number of fronts) as well as epic magic and a long-standing war between two mythical species, ensuring we turn the pages with all haste to see what becomes of characters we've quickly grown to love.

Rating: 4/5

Find Melissa & The Girl at Midnight:

Website • Twitter • Goodreads • Amazon