REVIEW: All Fall Down by Ally Carter

 

Grace Blakely is absolutely certain of three things:

1. She is not crazy.

2. Her mother was murdered.

3. Some day she is going to find the killer and make him pay.

As certain as Grace is about these facts, nobody else believes her—so there’s no one she can completely trust. Not her grandfather, a powerful ambassador. Not her new friends, who all live on Embassy Row. Not Alexei, the Russian boy next door, who is keep his eye on Grace for reasons she neither likes nor understand.

Everybody wants Grace to put on a pretty dress and a pretty smile, blocking out all her unpretty thoughts. But they can’t control Grace—no more than Grace can control what she knows or what she needs to do. Her past has come back to hunt her…and if she doesn’t stop it, Grace isn’t the only one who will get hurt. Because on Embassy Row, the countries of the world stand like dominoes, and one wrong move can make them all fall down.

That was really unexpected. You know, I thought I understood Ally Carter’s writing. She likes to write serial series’ that don’t delve into too much graphic content. She does it so well. I love her writing. I expected this book to be kind of like it. My first thought was that I was so glad the Scooby Gang got together so soon in this one, and then BANG! Carter went and changed everything with this book! It’s so much darker and twistier than what she’s written up till now. And I loved it!

From the start, I knew that Grace was gonna be a great protagonist. She’s a strong, independent woman who don’t need no man and has seen some stuff. She’s a dark character with a dark past, similar to Rachel Vincent’s protagonist in her Soul Screamers series. More than that, she has flaws for days. She knows she’ll never be one of the guys, and she hates it. She knows her whole family doesn’t love her like they used to before her mother was killed, and she knows everyone she’s her as the crazy, broken little girl.

It was kind of annoying how much the adults refused to little to Grace, but it also kind of made sense in the end. I just wish Grace had quit talking to them. We get it in the end, but the scenes got a little old. I also can’t say there were a lot of twists throughout the book, just simply the huge waterfall of them at the very end. I wish there’d been a little more throughout, but it was still a great book. I wasn’t hooked on the first couple chapters but after that I was flying through the book. (Spoiler alert) She leaped off a cliff and I leaped into the book. The book was dark and deep, and a great read. I can’t wait for the next one!

XOXO Tia