Your rating:
A story about a new girl in an old town filled with dark secrets . . . that might just kill her. People say the house is cursed. It preys on the weakest, and young women are its favorite victims. In Louth, they're called the Dead Girls. All Bram wanted was to disappear—from her old life, her family's past, and from the scandal that continues to haunt her. The only place left to go is Louth, the tiny town on the Hudson River where her uncle, James, has been renovating an old mansion. But James is haunted by his own ghosts. Months earlier, his beloved wife died in a fire that people say was set by her daughter. The tragedy left James a shell of the man Bram knew—and destroyed half the house he'd so lovingly restored. The manor is creepy, and so are the locals. The people of Louth don't want outsiders like Bram in their town, and with each passing day she's discovering that the rumors they spread are just as disturbing as the secrets they hide. Most frightening of all are the legends they tell about the Dead Girls. Girls whose lives were cut short in the very house Bram now calls home. The terrifying reality is that the Dead Girls may have never left the manor. And if Bram looks too hard into the town's haunted past, she might not either.
No posts yet
Kick off the convo with a theory, question, musing, or update
Your rating:
0 0**I was provided an electronic ARC from the publisher through NetGalley in exchange for honest review.**
Kirsten Miller presents a YA mystery thriller in Don't Tell a Soul. Readers follow Bram, a troubled girl going to live with her uncle in the country after something has happened to make her leave Manhattan. Bram soon follows that there are rumors about her uncle's manor being haunted, and begins to experience things that seem to be unexplainable. Of course, that just means Bram has to seek an explanation.
Miller's writing is readable and fast-paced, with a good build. Unfortunately, I never really got hooked, which left me a bit middle-of-the-road. It was interesting learning about all the small town rumors and secrets, and I felt that Miller did well at intertwining them. Everything established followed good logic and solid explanations, which is great, but contributed heavily to me finding the ending disappointing. I really wanted a paranormal thriller, and didn't find that here.
In addition, the characters were established, but I really wasn't invested in any of them. I never felt the stakes were high enough to be truly thrilling, and didn't particularly have enough attachment to care about the characters even if the stakes had been high.
That being said, I feel like this book would be great for its target audience of young adult, possibly folks new to the thriller genre, or folks interested in thrillers but don't actually want to feel scared. As an adult who knows their way around a thriller or two, the book came across as well-written but a little lackluster.
I do look forward to seeing what else Kirsten Miller comes out with in the future, and would be interested in potentially reading other works.
0
© 2024 Pagebound