Thank you to Netgalley for this ARC!

I thought the book was intriguing from the very beginning. I liked the contrast between the two characters - very rich Amanda who seems to live a good life and Rosalie who is kind of in a cult - and the setup was very little Pretty Little Liars-esque which is always riveting.

I guess why this book gets an average rating is because I didn't feel like the ending lived up to the hype. For a thriller, it was pretty tame and the stakes didn't feel high enough for both characters. Rosalie's story arc is ultimately the one that I find the most compelling and it would have actually been better if we could delve into her story and her extradition.

As characters, Amanda is quite meh and doesn't have much depth to her whereas Rosalie has more going for her. Rosalie has so much conflict in her arc that Amanda falls in the shadows. This is difficult because Amanda is the one who opens up the novel and thus would probably be the one who gets the most focus - which, here is the thing - Amanda gets a lot of screentime. Rosalie doesn't get enough pages for her story and that's a real shame because she carries the book forward.

A solid 3/5.

I really enjoyed this book! It was a gripping YA thriller with compelling characters and plot, and while I did guess/figure out the end a while in advance, I imagine that may just be as I read so many books in this genre!

Like the fool that I am, I went into this book believing the two girls in the blurb to be the endgame of this book. They are not. About 80 pages in, when I realised this, my motivation to read it plummeted. And that definitely did affect my rating of the book, but there were other things I was less than comfortable with (one other thing really. But it was pretty major).

All Eyes on Us is told from two points of view: Amanda’s and Rosalie’s. Amanda is the golden girl dating the golden boy, Carter. Rosalie is also dating Carter, but to get her fundamentalist Christian parents to stop scrutinising her after four years of conversion therapy and praying after she came out to them. Then Amanda starts getting these text messages from an unknown number, telling her that Carter is not all he seems.

Except the one thing I struggled with is that Amanda already knows that Carter is cheating on her with Rosalie. She also knows he’s done it in the past. So actually what we ended up with was less two girls who don’t know they’re each being cheated on (even if one of the relationships is a sham), and more of Amanda hating on Rosalie. Amanda has never met Rosalie, Carter is clearly the person in the wrong here, and I know that, sure, Amanda may be struggling to be wholly nice about Rosalie because she loves Carter, but. But. It’s 2019 and I don’t feel like reading a book where the character I’m supposed to feel sympathetic towards is actually horrible to everyone around her, even her supposed friends.

And then there’s the problem of Rosalie’s plotline. Rosalie is a lesbian. She came out to her parents four years previously leading to lots of prayers and some conversion therapy. Which we get the occasional graphic flashback to. Now here’s my first issue: if these flashbacks had been explicitly framed as some kind of trauma, maybe PTSD, then I could have stood them. I may have missed some subtext here, for sure, but it just felt… gratuitous almost. It’s clear her parents are homophobic, she says that a lot in the narrative, she mentions the conversion therapy. One thing I do not need is the graphic descriptions of it. I struggle reading books about this, even when the author is themselves part of the LGBT community, even when it’s something they’ve experienced (possibly that’s when I struggle most), so to have these scenes added, essentially just to show us her parents are homophobic and actively harming her? That felt unnecessary.

But really, this is what Rosalie’s side of the story revolves around. She’s dating Carter to keep her parents away (while also dating Paulina). She has the opportunity to leave her house, become “extradited” by her church, but she won’t because of her little sister. The private number plays on this by threatening to out her, and by telling Amanda to out her. (The one good thing about this storyline is that she doesn’t get outed, Amanda doesn’t do it, and the private number also suddenly seems to drop that plan.) I never felt like it got more in depth than this. Granted, I didn’t have that much of a clearer picture of Amanda’s motives, and she didn’t feel particularly fleshed out either, but it’s a tiring narrative to read. At this point, I only take the conversion therapy/religious family narratives from ownvoices authors, because it feels kind of like an overrepresented narrative (mostly because it’s all straight authors seem to be able to write about when it comes to lesbian characters especially, but I digress). Why not make Rosalie dating Carter about compulsory heterosexuality? Discuss that instead. But no, it’s just this tiring and overdone plotline for Rosalie.

Despite all that complaining, I did like a few things about this book. The writing is very readable, almost compulsively so. I definitely did not see the twist coming either (though I did pick one person who was involved, I didn’t pick the other, and the actual perpetrator was a HOLY SHIT moment). Finally, this is only the second book I’ve read this year that actually has the main character call herself a lesbian (and given the number of f/f books I’ve read, that’s depressing).

But ultimately, it was just that storyline with the lesbian character that disappointed me.

I really enjoyed this book. It might seem to be your standard YA thriller that seem to be multiplying every month, but it’s a setup that I haven’t seen before with characters that you root for & come to care about. It shows the extra pressures that teenagers are under these days with social media, along with class differences across society.

The mystery keeps you interested all the way through the book, & I didn’t guess who was the culprit at all. The character development was good & I was satisfied with the ending, everything was tied up,

Thank you to NetGalley for the ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

"We're at the center of everything. All eyes on us."

* * * *
4 / 5

I'd describe All Eyes On Us as a cross between Pretty Little Liars and One of Us is Lying with a dash of The Thousandth Floor. This deceptively simple book packs a lot in and is entertaining, with lots of the drama and the glitz and glamour of the wealthy alongside plot twists. 

"Everyone wants my attention the second we hit the doors. That's the price of being Amanda Kelly"

All Eyes On Us alternates between Amanda Kelly, devoted girlfriend to real estate heir Carter Shaw, and Rosalie Bell, the girl that Carter is cheating on Amanda with. The twist? Rosalie is a lesbian and is using Carter as a beard to protect herself from her hardcore Christian parents who will send her back to conversion therapy at the slightest suspicion. The two girls have difficult enough lives without a mysterious person sending them texts, demanding that Rosalie tells Carter that she's been sneaking around with Pauline behind his back, and that Amanda breaks up with him.

Amanda is probably the less sympathetic character of the two, but once the book peels away the glitz of her life to reveal the rather more depressing reality, she grew on me. Her parents are going broke and her alcoholic mother is pressuring her to stay together with Carter despite his pattern of cheating on her because his family is rich. Amanda essentially has the weight of her family's future pressed onto her. But she's also quite judgy and looks down on her the lower class people that her friends associate with.

"I close my eyes and the girl inside beats her fists against my rib cage, desperate to get out. Just a few more months, I promise her. Just until we're safe"

Rosalie is more obviously sympathetic: as a young teenager she came out to her parents and they responded by sending her to a conversion camp. She wants to flee her extreme Christian fundamentalist family but can't, mostly because of her younger sister. Instead she sneaks around with her girlfriend Pau behind Carter's back and counts down the days until she can leave for college. My one complaint here is the Pau is a bit of a flat character - she smokes cigarettes and is a bad girl, but there's not really that much to her. She mostly serves to act as another suspect for the texter mystery.

All Eyes On Us was a fun read with a lot of depth. Looking back, the mystery was easy to guess, which is exactly how these books should be. 

My thanks to Netgalley, the publisher, and the author for an ARC of All Eyes On Us.

An amazing coming of age story. The story delves into subjects such as LBGTQ and finding your true self. Some subjects were difficult to read. As it shows what some young people are facing today. it was so well written. Amazing YA thriller xx