Joined in 2023 
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There was a vague attempt at foreshadowing but it was so brief and so subtle you'd blink and miss it. It was not nearly enough - where were our breadcrumbs to follow? WHERE THE FREAK DID I GET CASEY FROM? ITS WRITTEN BY ALEXIA MASON? DID CASEY WRITE ONE OF US IS LYING?
Loved the grammar in that one (sarcastic). The prologue is just one big giant mess that I decided to ignore. It was so childish and it wasn't needed at all because...guess what?! We don't read about them walking down once Kelly dies! The prologue could have worked better. The shape it created was a mess, as well. I couldn't understand so many things! By the end, I was in such chaos that I didn't even bother to get what the ending meant. Actually, let's talk about that ending.This is only the beginning of a thrilling adventure that includes venturing into ancient times such as the 1990s (where “the Rachel haircut is a time marker”) and grappling with the seemingly immutable rules of an unfair world. Joan desperately wants to save her murdered family, even as she is told it’s impossible: “Every monster goes up against the timeline...Everyone tries to change something at some point.” Actually. Not just me. Because the author - I forget their name, sorry! - kept writing random things leaving me incredibly confused as to what was going on. If that makes sense, which it probably doesn’t tbh (TBH OLIVIA!!) but like… yeah. The characters weren’t bland, so to speak, (what the hell does so to speak mean - yk when you just know when to put a phrase into your sentence but the actual phrase just doesn’t make sense? No just me?) The plot moves swiftly and neatly, as one would expect from this author (Mason is another pen name for crime writer Alex Barclay). But the characterisation feels thin, and this significantly lessens the impact of the dramatic events on the reader.
I liked the fact that Suze was in the "laundry room" this whole time. I liked Suze as a character, but I wish she was explored more; I found her very interesting. Another twist that I liked is in the epilogue. Can't believe I liked something from the epilogue! I enjoyed the use of the repetition to explain how everyone was involved in Kelly's murder. It worked okay. I really liked the fact that they were all guilty, in some way. Other than those two twists, I didn't quite enjoy the rest. Especially the asylum thing, since it wasn't a huge deal in the end. Sixteen-year-old Joan Chang-Hunt discovers she’s a “monster”, a member of one of the 12 great families of London with particular powers, including the capacity to steal time from humans. And that cute boy, incidentally, is out to kill her – he is the legendary “hero” determined to and prophesied to put an end to all of Joan’s kind. This was the same with the freaking setting, they’re supposed to be in a old Irish building that was meant to be an asylum, yet the author described it in such little detail that I was doing most of the imagining that it got tiring thinking what everything and everyone looked like I gotta say, I LOVED Rupert - he’s the only thing that brought this book up to 3 stars. Not that Rupe is a “thing”, but you know what I mean.I don't want to keep harping on but, basically, this book needs major work. I can see it's already garnered a very low average score on Goodreads and I can see why. It's simply not ready for public consumption yet. It has zero suspense, zero thrills, 2D characters and hardly any plot. It reads like a bad first draft. By the closing stages we had moved into a setting that made it clear we were going to see the death. However, by this stage I could have quite happily seen any of the characters in this position and not been concerned, and the actual description of the death was so choppily done that it felt like a ‘blink-and-you’ll-miss-it’ moment. This book sounded right up my street from the description. I also thought the title was killer. Unfortunately, it was incredibly boring and I really struggled to finish it. Even though the characters don't have a personality I did get attached to them eventually, but not really to Kelly tho.
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