Q U I C K S T A T S
Characters: ⭐⭐
Setting: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Writing style: ⭐
Overall rating: ⭐⭐⭐. 5
T H E B O O K
// Content Warning: Alcohol / Arson / Child abuse / Death (of child) / Death (of parent) / Domestic abuse / Drugs / Gun violence / Incest / Murder / Self-harm / Sexual abuse / Smoking / Suicide //
Publisher: Razorbill
Age rating: 14+
Genre(s): Thriller
Pub date: September 7th 2021
P R E M I S E
A teen girl disappears from her small town deep in the bayou, where magic festers beneath the surface of the swamp like water rot, in this chilling debut supernatural thriller for fans of Natasha Preston, Karen McManus, and Rory Power.
La Cachette, Louisiana, is the worst place to be if you have something to hide.
This tiny town, where seventeen-year-old Grey spends her summers, is the self-proclaimed Psychic Capital of the World--and the place where Elora Pellerin, Grey's best friend, disappeared six months earlier.
Grey can't believe that Elora vanished into thin air any more than she can believe that nobody in a town full of psychics knows what happened. But as she digs into the night that Elora went missing, she begins to realize that everybody in town is hiding something - her grandmother Honey; her childhood crush Hart; and even her late mother, whose secrets continue to call to Grey from beyond the grave.
When a mysterious stranger emerges from the bayou - a stormy-eyed boy with links to Elora and the town's bloody history - Grey realizes that La Cachette's past is far more present and dangerous than she'd ever understood. Suddenly, she doesn't know who she can trust. In a town where secrets lurk just below the surface, and where a murderer is on the loose, nobody can be presumed innocent--and La Cachette's dark and shallow lies may just rip the town apart.
M Y R E V I E W
↬ PRE-THOUGHTS
I get the feeling that everything I guess is going to be very wrong.
WAIT IS THAT A GIRL'S SILLHOUETTE ON THE COVER? I'M SCARED.
↬ PLOT
Dark and Shallow lies is a YA thriller and for a debut novel, it was actually really good. The story follows Meira, one of the 'summer children' (I'll explain that in a little) who visits the island every summer following her mother's death/suicide. For everyone wondering, yes, the island is completely fictional, I looked it up because it sounded so cool.
Last summer, however, Meira and her best friend Elora had a huge falling apart who is known as her 'twin flame' (this town is full of psychics and there's a lot of references to witchcraft and stuff like that) and when she returns, she discovers that Elora had vanished without a trace and of course, she's devastated. Along with the rest of the 'summer children' (all of them were born in the same summer and so yeah, they come as a group), she begins to find out the old town's secrets and realises that there's something no one wants to tell her and is determined to find all the answers herself.
↬ WRITING AND SETTING
❝...The dead? They lie. Just like the rest of us...❞
The writing? No❤️
I wasn't a huge fan of it, especially the dialogue. It was very difficult to keep track of what's being said and who's saying it and I had to reread several sentences over and over again just to understand it. For a book that had a really gripping premise, the promised product didn't cut it. If the entire book was written just like the premise, it might have been a 4 from me. I expected disturbing imagery and gritty dialogue but that just never happened. It's like I went to Prada for a satchel and ended up with a beat down one from Goodwill. Now there's absolutely nothing wrong with Goodwill, it's just that it wasn't what I was looking for.
From all the information I have gathered about La Cachette, I will sum up its general vibe with three images.
Think Wuthering heights, The Wicked Deep and We Were Liars.
For some reason the pictures aren't clear, apologies.
↬ CHARACTERS
For a seventeen-year-old, Meira definitely does not have her shit together. She was really naive and I can't pin point the exact feeling but I'm going to describe it as much as I can; she was more of a vision than a person. Like, I know she's fictional but the goal is to not have me realise that she is. I mean her twin flame vanished and suddenly she's wrapping into her psychic abilities which is none other than Elora's flashbacks of the fateful night and that's obviously very distressing.
Hart was... I don't want to talk about that guy. I think I was supposed to like him but for the life of me I couldn't. From his first appearance I could tell something was off and he gave off the weirdest energy anyone ever could. I haven't seen fanart of him yet but in my head he's this white-washed version of book tok's favourite vampire psycho, Hawke Flynn from From Blood and Ash (this book has been all over the internet, you've had time).
Other characters include Zale (my absolute favourite and the only character I wish I saw more of but like, he does realise shirts exist right?), Evie (someone needs to kill her uncle ASAP and send her to therapy), Aunt Honey, Case (the possessive ex-boyfriend or boyfriend I don't remember), and a bunch of others I can't be bothered to recall.
And Good Lord we get another Camila-Charles thing (characters from The Secret History) going on here as well, and let me tell you I was devastated. First of all, there's a place for that and it's called Alabama and second, it adds NOTHING to the storyline. This one part reminds me of The Thousandth Floor which features a girl having a huge crush on her (wait for it) step brother. What in the- Sweet Home Alabama.
↬ CONCLUSION
Pros: Beautiful cover
Cons: Sweet Home Alabama
Overall rating: 3.5/5
T R O P E S
Friends to lovers
Love triangle (kinda?)
S I M I L A R B O O K S
The Dead and the Dark by Courtney Gould
↬ The Dark has been waiting for far too long, and it won't stay hidden any longer.
Something is wrong in Snakebite, Oregon. Teenagers are disappearing, some turning up dead, the weather isn’t normal, and all fingers seem to point to TV’s most popular ghost hunters who have just returned to town. Logan Ortiz-Woodley, daughter of TV's ParaSpectors, has never been to Snakebite before, but the moment she and her dads arrive, she starts to get the feeling that there's more secrets buried here than they originally let on.
Ashley Barton’s boyfriend was the first teen to go missing, and she’s felt his presence ever since. But now that the Ortiz-Woodleys are in town, his ghost is following her and the only person Ashley can trust is the mysterious Logan. When Ashley and Logan team up to figure out who—or what—is haunting Snakebite, their investigation reveals truths about the town, their families, and themselves that neither of them are ready for. As the danger intensifies, they realize that their growing feelings for each other could be a light in the darkness.
House of Hollow by Krystal Sutherland
↬ Seventeen-year-old Iris Hollow has always been strange. Something happened to her and her two older sisters when they were children, something they can’t quite remember but that left each of them with an identical half-moon scar at the base of their throats.
Iris has spent most of her teenage years trying to avoid the weirdness that sticks to her like tar. But when her eldest sister, Grey, goes missing under suspicious circumstances, Iris learns just how weird her life can get: horned men start shadowing her, a corpse falls out of her sister’s ceiling, and ugly, impossible memories start to twist their way to the forefront of her mind.
As Iris retraces Grey’s last known footsteps and follows the increasingly bizarre trail of breadcrumbs she left behind, it becomes apparent that the only way to save her sister is to decipher the mystery of what happened to them as children.
The closer Iris gets to the truth, the closer she comes to understanding that the answer is dark and dangerous – and that Grey has been keeping a terrible secret from her for years.
B O O K S M E N T I O N E D
Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
The Wicked Deep by Shea Ernshaw
We Were Liars by E. Lockhart
From Blood and Ash by Jennifer L. Armentrout
The Thousandth Floor by Katharine McGee
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