The Cousins

I've never read a contemporary YA mystery-thriller before, and I was curious about this one. It definitely kept my attention, but I also don't feel eager to continue reading the genre. Still, it was a real page-turner. I'm definitely not the target audience for this book, though, so please take my review in that spirit. I listened to the audiobook and it was very well done, with several different narrators.

About halfway through, I had a guess about the ending which turned out to be totally wrong. So there were some good red herrings, or good to me, anyway. The ending was satisfying, although I didn't predict much about it. I always felt like there was enough detail to make things believable.

There was not a ton of depth to any of the three cousins, but that's okay, because it's more of a plot-driven book. There are also chapters from the PoV of Millie's mother as a teenager. Because of the nature of the book, these kids trying to figure out what happened when their parents were young, her chapters were the ones I was most interested in. So those were the most gripping, but she was the least interesting character of the four. Also, all the leads are hetero but there's an important gay side character who turns out to be pretty saintly, and I don't know, but his saintliness just hit me wrong.

Overall, my experience was somewhere between “okay” and “good.” Perfectly fine but nothing I'm excited about. I wanted something with a fast pace, and this book delivered on that front.