Found this all a bit too far-fetched from the beginning, and the story veered too far on unbelievable rather than enjoyable for me.

This was ok. I got Gossip Girl vibes from the offset. I heard a lot of great things, but it just didn't click with me. I didn't like the main character, so I wasn't rooting for her and that ruined the experience.

I don't think that this was really the book for me.

With a few contemporary books coming out recently with similar themes, I feel that A Secret Beat had a lot of strong competition and for me it just didn't really stand up.

This brief review appears on Goodreads. My book blog is currently on hiatus due to finals, so when I'm able to get it up and running again, I might cross-post this; however, as it's a negative review, I probably won't as I prefer to post positive reviews there!
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I actually really didn't like this very much, which is a shame, because I'd heard good things and it only has positive reviews so far. But it just didn't work for me. In part, that's because I didn't click with the writing style, but mostly it's that I strongly disliked Alexia as a character, never felt anything vaguely resembling sympathy for her, and actually didn't *want* her situation to work out because she didn't deserve it.

Alexia is... well, she's spoiled, frankly. She's had every opportunity handed to her, she's flown to London and found herself a flat and a job in media at the age of eighteen, and while she's finally facing some real-life consequences for the first time because she has no idea how to live on a budget or behave like an actual human being with empathy, you never get the impression that these will have a particularly meaningful impact on her as a person. Especially as she still seems to get away with everything -- and though she does some fairly unpleasant things, everybody seems ready to forgive her.

There were a few wry jokes about how privileged she was and how it was her upbringing that made it possible for her to live this kind of lifestyle, but those didn't really make up for how jarring it was to hear a character complain about her immensely wealthy lifestyle. At one point she states that she's learned not to complain about it because it makes people dislike her -- not because, you know, she doesn't have anything to complain about. I also just wasn't a fan of how she blames her mother's mental illness for her own behaviour and effectively accuses her mother of not being there for her when she clearly had problems of her own; something about it felt off.

In her own book, Greta would probably have been annoying; she managed to be endearing solely by comparison to Alexia, who made everyone else look stunningly sympathetic, but on the whole... nah. None of them were characters I could root for. And I'm usually way too attached to all characters too, so this level of apathy/downright dislike is unusual for me.