Character Development: ☆☆☆☆☆
"She's gone through a breakup and is falling apart. In a bid to clear her head and fix her life, she goes with her friend Nate to New York City over the winter holiday break. Just a nice quiet time with two friends, writing and reflecting, recovering.Well, until one of the neighbors asks Stevie a very strange question about murder. And cults. And then dies.Why does death seem to follow Stevie around? There has to be a reason for that. She'll work it out, just as soon as the murders stop. Oh, and maybe she isn't so broken up after all?Why do we believe what we believe? Are omens real? And does anyone join a cult?"
I waited so long for this book to come out, and now I can hardly believe it's over. My brain is very tired (unrelated to the book, it just is) and I can't get my spoiler tags to work, so I'm just going to warn...there are spoilers beyond this point. Read with caution.
Maureen Johnson is amazing at cutting back and forth between the past and the present, giving the reader juuuust enough of a glimpse of what happened to have them salivating for more and then jumping back to Stevie, but the mystery of this book centering around a cult ratcheted that edge-of-your-seat suspense up to eleven. Literally all I wanted to do was sit and read, and anytime I had to stop to actually live my life I was thinking about what might have happened, trying to unravel the mystery.
And then alongside all this cult action, we have everything that happened with David in England, the fallout still actively falling out. We get an unexpected FedEx delivery on Stevie's birthday, and it's David's contextless coat, only later learning that there was a LETTER in the coat that Janelle decided not to tell her about. We get David's comment on Stevie's Instagram post and her subsequent spiraling. We're gifted truly so much teen breakup angst, and I was both dying and in heaven at the same time. I was also ultimately very proud of Stevie for telling David that he wanted to be forgiven immediately without having to do the work to earn her trust back and that that wasn't okay. So wise.
God, what else...the cast of apartment characters were so perfect and delightful, I loved them all. Luna, Benny, and Helen were so badass and marching to the beats of their own drums, and while some of them were overbearing or judgmental and I for sure would not want to spend time with them in real life, they all felt so true-to-life and like people you could really end up with as neighbors. All of the apartment interactions just felt so real. And the secret room in the basement and Stevie's willingness to go to a second location with a Goth...wonderful.
It's probably weird to do a review of the sixth book in a series, so...sorry? But I loved this whole series so much, and after the release of this was delayed like seven months, I couldn't resist. Especially with Stevie telling David at the end of the book that she's giving up mysteries and murder, because that has me SPINNING. It's an understandable reaction to going to New York and a chain of death/murder being set off by your arrival, but do I believe that's actually going to happen? Absolutely not. I can't wait to see what happens in the final book of the series.
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