It’s been quite a while since I started and finished a book in the same day and okay, it helps that it’s half term this week, so I basically just slobbed on the sofa reading while everyone moved around me speeded-up style, but still.
All Fall Down was a great book!
Grace is a teenager with a troubled past. Three years ago, she saw her mother murdered by a man with a scarred face. Trouble is, everyone else keeps telling her that her mum died in a house fire. Grace knows she’s not crazy and she knows what she saw, so when she’s sent to live with her grandfather, the U.S. ambassador to Adria, and she finds the Scarred Man living in the same city, then what’s a girl to do? Why, rope all her new friends in for a huge teenage investigation, of course!
Yeah, Grace is one of those protagonists who rushes in without thinking (following a man who you suspect is a trained killer through miles of underground tunnels with no torch and no one knows where you are) but actually her actions didn’t make me want to shout ‘You should be running out the door, not going upstairs to investigate a suspicious noise!’. All the way through, her motivation is to find her mother’s murderer and to prove to everyone that she isn’t crazy, so that made it slightly more believable than the random actions of characters in other books.
The plot itself slows down a bit in places, but there’s still plenty of action to keep you hooked. The fact that I was reading it on my Kindle whilst stirring a saucepan of beans this evening says something. Ally Carter’s writing is great. She deals with sensitive issues like mental health, PTSD and bereavement with a light touch that keeps you reading but without downplaying their seriousness.
If I could change anything about this book, I would have liked to see Grace’s relationship with Alexei developed a bit more, but I understand that this is the first book in a new series, so I guess there’s plenty of time for that further down the line.
All in all, I was pleasantly surprised by All Fall Down. Definitely recommended.
9/10