Goodreads

Release Date: September 8th, 2020

Genre(s): Young adult, mystery, thriller

Publisher: HarperCollins/Quill Tree

Pages: 256

Rating:⭐️⭐️⭐️.25

Thank you to HarperCollins and Epic Reads Insiders for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.

Synopsis

Nobody Knows But You is a YA mystery about the events leading up to a murder at a summer camp. The book follows Kayla and her recollections of what happened at camp, becoming best friends with Lainie, and how Lainie became the prime suspect to the murder of her on-and-off boyfriend, Jackson. Kayla recounts everything that happened, and shares in the series of letters, text messages, and more what there secrets were – until we find out what really happened.

Review

Reading YA mysteries/thrillers is something I’ve wanted to get into more, and this one was pretty interesting! While this was a quick mystery novel, there was quite a bit to piece together with all of the mixed media accounts, in addition to Kayla not revealing everything right away. One of the types of media I liked in particular was the camper interviews, where other campers discuss rumors they’ve heard about the main characters. Since they’re rumors quite a few of them tend to be far-fetched, but there are others that have quite a bit of truth to them – you just have to figure out what’s what.

Something else I liked in particular about Nobody Knows But You is that the characters are a bit younger, at ages 14-16, compared to your regular YA book where they’re around 18. I think this is important to keep in mind if you’re looking for older YA, but at the same time, I feel as though there isn’t as much YA out there with younger characters, so I saw this as a nice change.

There were times, especially in the beginning, where I had a hard time differentiating Kayla and Lainie’s actions as Kayla was recounting them. While there are scenes where Kayla is portrayed as the innocent one in comparison, there were times where they didn’t stand out from each other as much as they could have.

I also felt that, once we knew the full motivations of the murder and who did it, that the things driving that murder were not materialized as well as they could have been. Yes, we do see the events behind that decision, but we don’t feel anything towards those events. Maybe that’s intentional to drive the question of who did it and why towards the end, but I think some of those stories leading up to the reveal could have been more materialized than they were.

Other than that, I thought that Nobody Knows but You was a quick and light, yet interesting YA mystery. I’m not sure whether I’d consider myself great at figuring out the mystery or not, but I thought the twist in this one was pretty interesting and I was able to look back for the clues I missed along the way. I personally don’t like it when mysteries provide an answer that’s so left out of field that you’d never figure it out, but once I knew who did it, I was able to immediately pinpoint hints from past scenes. I’d recommend this for those that enjoy reading about younger characters in YA, unreliable narrators, and mixed media.