My Rating ~ Two and a half Stars

RELEASED: 13 June 2019

Publisher: Usborne Publishing

Format: Paperback

Pages: 247

Blurb

Three close friends. Two unforgettable summers. One girl’s darkest secret.

Alys appeared last summer, and then she vanished without a trace. Cait’s new in town and she needs to know the truth: Who is Alys?

Review

Thankyou to Usborne Publishing for providing me with a copy of My Secret Lies With You, in exchange for an honest review.

Cait doesn’t want to be on holidays in Wales with her mum and her mum’s new boyfriend, she wishes she was on holidays with her friend in Ibiza or anywhere warm and fun. So when she meets the boy next door on her first day, she decides to hang out with him and his friends at a party. As the days go on, her new friends don’t seem to want to talk about the posters Cait has seen around town for a missing girl, but they do mention Alys, a girl they spent one day with last summer. The trio haven’t been able to get hold of her since and Cait wants to know just what happened last summer, and what happened to Alys?

The mystery in this book was slightly intriguing, but it just wasn’t enough to overshadow the fact that the two girls, Cait and Hannah, were about the most unlikeable characters I’ve ever read. Cait was so horribly self centred, childish and bratty I actually just felt mad throughout most of the book. I wanted to give Cait’s mother a hug. And Hannah was just unlikeable and rude for the sake of it. The blurb alludes to a ‘dark secret’ and Cait “needing to know the truth about Alys”. If there was a particularly dark secret, I missed it. I mean, I saw the secret, but I’m not sure it could be described as dark. I also still can’t figure out for the life of me why Cait needed to know about Alys, who she’d never met, so badly. The boys, Marko and Ifan were interesting characters and the actual writing was good – the descriptions of places and people were rich and detailed, making it easy to create the scenes inside my head, but ultimately the plot was a bit underwhelming in the end, and the characters’ personalities had this one falling a bit flat for me.