Medium – Book
About the Book – Audrey and Ivy are two students at the prestigious Illumen Hall on the South Coast of England. The school is famous and well-regarded, with a strange obsession with magpies. Ivy is a straight-A student who lives in a council flat in London outside of term-time, Audrey is an American sweetheart with a rich daddy who moves to the UK after trauma in her past. Before Audrey arrives, the normally kind and friendly school experiences a terrible event – at an end-of-term party, the popular and beautiful Lola Radcliffe is found dead on the local beach with an elaborate tattoo of a magpie on her back. Soon after term restarts, a mysterious podcast airs, with the headline ‘I know who killed Lola. And one of you is next’.
My Rating – 3.5/5
My Thoughts – This book was part of one of the YA book boxes I get, and came with a whole set of bookish treats under the theme of ‘Secret Societies’. It’s a book I have mixed feelings about, so I will discuss what I enjoyed first, and then not so much. So, firstly, I really liked the burgeoning friendship between Ivy and Audrey – they start off really hating each other, but come to like each other regardless of their differences. They are likeable characters, and Ivy especially is someone that manages to be kind and caring without losing her edge. The school seems generally quite a nice place to be – a bit of cattiness and bitching, but no huge bullying rings etc. The plot was engrossing and kept my interest. The descriptions of both main characters’ anxieties and panic attacks are believable. I read the book quickly and needed to finish it before I could go to sleep – the sign of a good book!
So – what wasn’t so good? There were some bits of the book which weren’t as well written. The book is written by two authors and I did wonder if one of the characters was written by one of the authors and one the other, as I found Ivy’s chapters generally better written than Audrey’s. For a YA book there is an awful lot of swearing. I am a little sensitive to swearing in books, but generally expect it in more ‘adult’ books. The swearing just seemed a little randomly placed. The descriptions of the characters are a bit laboured – every character is defined by their skin colour before any other aspects. I love that the authors made the school so multi-cultural, but the descriptions of the colour of each of the characters’ skintones just seemed a bit clumsy. Another aspect I thought could have been done ‘better’ in this age of interactivity was the online elements – a website is provided but doesn’t really link anywhere, a podcast is mentioned which could have been created. It just seems like the book’s PR teams missed a trick.
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