I really enjoyed this book! It was a gripping YA thriller with compelling characters and plot, and while I did guess/figure out the end a while in advance, I imagine that may just be as I read so many books in this genre!

Like the fool that I am, I went into this book believing the two girls in the blurb to be the endgame of this book. They are not. About 80 pages in, when I realised this, my motivation to read it plummeted. And that definitely did affect my rating of the book, but there were other things I was less than comfortable with (one other thing really. But it was pretty major).

All Eyes on Us is told from two points of view: Amanda’s and Rosalie’s. Amanda is the golden girl dating the golden boy, Carter. Rosalie is also dating Carter, but to get her fundamentalist Christian parents to stop scrutinising her after four years of conversion therapy and praying after she came out to them. Then Amanda starts getting these text messages from an unknown number, telling her that Carter is not all he seems.

Except the one thing I struggled with is that Amanda already knows that Carter is cheating on her with Rosalie. She also knows he’s done it in the past. So actually what we ended up with was less two girls who don’t know they’re each being cheated on (even if one of the relationships is a sham), and more of Amanda hating on Rosalie. Amanda has never met Rosalie, Carter is clearly the person in the wrong here, and I know that, sure, Amanda may be struggling to be wholly nice about Rosalie because she loves Carter, but. But. It’s 2019 and I don’t feel like reading a book where the character I’m supposed to feel sympathetic towards is actually horrible to everyone around her, even her supposed friends.

And then there’s the problem of Rosalie’s plotline. Rosalie is a lesbian. She came out to her parents four years previously leading to lots of prayers and some conversion therapy. Which we get the occasional graphic flashback to. Now here’s my first issue: if these flashbacks had been explicitly framed as some kind of trauma, maybe PTSD, then I could have stood them. I may have missed some subtext here, for sure, but it just felt… gratuitous almost. It’s clear her parents are homophobic, she says that a lot in the narrative, she mentions the conversion therapy. One thing I do not need is the graphic descriptions of it. I struggle reading books about this, even when the author is themselves part of the LGBT community, even when it’s something they’ve experienced (possibly that’s when I struggle most), so to have these scenes added, essentially just to show us her parents are homophobic and actively harming her? That felt unnecessary.

But really, this is what Rosalie’s side of the story revolves around. She’s dating Carter to keep her parents away (while also dating Paulina). She has the opportunity to leave her house, become “extradited” by her church, but she won’t because of her little sister. The private number plays on this by threatening to out her, and by telling Amanda to out her. (The one good thing about this storyline is that she doesn’t get outed, Amanda doesn’t do it, and the private number also suddenly seems to drop that plan.) I never felt like it got more in depth than this. Granted, I didn’t have that much of a clearer picture of Amanda’s motives, and she didn’t feel particularly fleshed out either, but it’s a tiring narrative to read. At this point, I only take the conversion therapy/religious family narratives from ownvoices authors, because it feels kind of like an overrepresented narrative (mostly because it’s all straight authors seem to be able to write about when it comes to lesbian characters especially, but I digress). Why not make Rosalie dating Carter about compulsory heterosexuality? Discuss that instead. But no, it’s just this tiring and overdone plotline for Rosalie.

Despite all that complaining, I did like a few things about this book. The writing is very readable, almost compulsively so. I definitely did not see the twist coming either (though I did pick one person who was involved, I didn’t pick the other, and the actual perpetrator was a HOLY SHIT moment). Finally, this is only the second book I’ve read this year that actually has the main character call herself a lesbian (and given the number of f/f books I’ve read, that’s depressing).

But ultimately, it was just that storyline with the lesbian character that disappointed me.

An amazing coming of age story. The story delves into subjects such as LBGTQ and finding your true self. Some subjects were difficult to read. As it shows what some young people are facing today. it was so well written. Amazing YA thriller xx