Grace Blakely is absolutely certain of three things:
1. She is not crazy. 2. Her mother was murdered. 3. Someday 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 keeping an eye on Grace for reasons she neither likes nor understands.
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 all stand like dominoes, and one wrong move can make them all fall down. (taken from the synopsis of All Fall Down by Ally Carter on allycarter.com.)
I am not usually a thriller/murder mystery reader, but I saw this book on instagram (if you’re not following me, then please head over to instagram and check me out. My instagram is bookandbloomies and I post everyday! I post both book related things and every day I post an inspirational quote post which has a discussion question that is usually related to the quote.) And I wanted to see what the hype was about, I was weary to try it out because last time I picked up a book that I saw all over instagram I couldn’t even finish it. I picked up Heartless by Marissa Meyer and I couldn’t get through more than 100 pages of it. This book is the first in the Embassy Row trilogy.
So, I originally took the book out of the library and then I found it at a local used book store so I decided to buy it because I had a feeling it was going to take me a while to finish the book. And I was right, it did take me awhile. When I started reading the book, I thought I was going to really like it. I liked Grace and I liked the friends she made later into the story, but once you get more than halfway through the story Grace becomes this whirlwind train wreck who destroys everything in sight.
She was on the road to recovery in the beginning of the novel and towards the end she was plummeting. Instead of any character development with Grace, it was as if she was reverting back. Grace has PTSD, I think the author does a good job trying to convey to the reader what it is like to live with that. The book is published by scholastic, to me when I think of scholastic I think of when I was a kid and getting the book orders. I personally feel that if the book could have been published by a publisher that does more books for a teen audience this book could have been a lot better. I feel that since the publishers main demographic is younger readers, the meaning to the story gets lost.
I’m not 100% sure if I want to continue the trilogy. I feel like if I don’t, I may be wondering what happens but at the same time I don’t feel so attached to the story that I have to read the rest of the books.
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