Review: The Cabin

Title: The Cabin
Author: Natasha Preston
Publication Date: September 6, 2016
Genre: Young Adult Mystery/Thriller/Suspense
Recommended If You Like: young adult reads, romance, the killer is one of us, teenage drama

I received an ARC of this book from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. This did not affect my opinion of the book or my review itself.

The Book:

Mackenzie thinks this will just be a weekend with her group of friends, off in a cabin drinking and having fun. But when two of them are murdered, suddenly all of them are under suspicion, and all their secrets are coming out.

What I Liked:

I love the "the killer is one of us" trope, done to absolute perfection by Agatha Christie in And Then There Were None. So any time a book tackles that, I'm going to appreciate it.

The book starts out strong. Preston builds a lot of suspense as the characters get settled in the cabin, and we pick up on tension that hints at a big event from the past.

Anything I Didn't Like?
Unfortunately, yes. I was really excited about this book, because of the trope it was centered around. And it did start out strong.

But the romance feels cliched, and to me that was because of the writing style. The way Preston describes the way the two characters feel about each other is very hearts in the eyes and butterflies in the stomach, which is fine, but I was looking for more from the writing.

The revelations from the characters' pasts also seem to come completely out of left field. I understand that the idea is that you never really know a person and what they're hiding behind their facade, but the secrets just don't seem to fit with what we have been shown about the characters and their relationships. This makes the ending twists seem rushed and out of left field as well.

So...?

I had been really excited to read this book since I first heard about it, and unfortunately, it just didn't deliver for me.