This week we’re looking at a book about summer camps, just as summer camp season starts up! This week, we’re looking at I’ll Never Tell by Catherine McKenzie.
This is the story of a family that each experienced the same tragic event years ago – and has been keeping secrets from each other about their own involvement in that event ever since. The story is intriguing and well paced, with a convenient in-story and in-book chart that helps drive the plot along nicely. With the explosive mandate set by their father, will the children be able to come together and finally spill the secrets each keeps? Or will these secrets tear this family asunder?
Structurally, the story is told from the perspective of very nearly everyone involved as each struggles to piece together what really happened that night all those years ago. Because someone truly has secrets that they never intend to tell. This is an excellent technique for telling this story, as it reveals many things to the reader before the characters reveal it to each other, and yet at the same time this very mechanism increases the mystery for the reader.
Overall an excellent book that had this reader hooked from the get-go. Very highly recommended.
And as always, the Goodreads/ Amazon review:
What Book Are You Reading? I’ll never tell. (Ok, so that was a fun joke. The first couple… thousand… times I used it when people were asking me what I was reading.) But seriously, this is an awesome book. McKenzie does an excellent job here of keeping the reader guessing until the final reveal within the last 10% of the book, and even includes an unexpected bonus surprise closer to 2/3 in. Great job of keeping the tale moving through multiple characters’ perspectives, and fantastic story overall.