CJ Reviews We’ll Never Be Apart by Emiko Jean

Title: We’ll Never Be Apart
Author: Emiko Jean
Publication Date: October 6, 2015
Format: Advanced Reader Copy
Rating: 2.5 stars

Murder.
Fire.
Revenge.

That’s all seventeen-year-old Alice Monroe thinks about. Committed to a mental ward at Savage Isle, Alice is haunted by memories of the fire that killed her boyfriend, Jason. A blaze her twin sister Cellie set. But when Chase, a mysterious, charismatic patient, agrees to help her seek vengeance, Alice begins to rethink everything. Writing out the story of her troubled past in a journal, she must confront hidden truths.

Is the one person she trusts only telling her half the story? Nothing is as it seems in this edge-of-your-seat psychological thriller from the debut author Emiko Jean. (Goodreads)

I have to be honest and admit I’m not really sure how to review this book. It’s easy to review books that you absolutely loved and can’t stop raving about, or books that you really didn’t like and want everyone to know why, but it’s really hard to review a book that you feel somewhat ambivalent about.

The premise of this story was really interesting – the setting in the mental ward, the animosity of the sisters, whether or not Alice could trust Chase. I also really liked the characters themselves. I thought they were compelling characters and I cared enough about them to keep reading, even though I wasn’t really getting into the story as much as I had hoped I would. However, I did tend to find Chase a much more interesting character than Alice. I also liked the structure of the novel – each chapter contained a portion of Alice’s diary, so you saw her point of view of all the events from her childhood leading to the fire in the barn. This book had a lot of good things going for it.

The problem with the book is that I knew exactly what the major twist would be within the first few pages of the book. I can’t put my finger on what gave it away – perhaps the mental ward setting – but no matter what evidence was given throughout the book for one version, I knew the entire time that my assumption was correct and it was. I was actually a little disappointed to learn that I was right because part of me really want to be wrong so the book would be less predictable. Sometimes the journey can still be enjoyable even when you know the destination. Unfortunately, this was not one of those times. Knowing the twist that far in advance also made reading the rest of the story feel a little slow, because I was just waiting for the reveal, which seemed to take forever.

Though billed as a psychological thriller, I really felt like this novel lacked the suspense that kept me glued to The Dead House. I don’t want to give too much about this novel away with that comparison, but I do feel the psychological aspects were handled much better in that novel than in this one, even though The Dead House was more of a horror novel.

I don’t want to discourage anyone from reading this book if they’re genuinely interested; I’m sure some will enjoy it much more than I did. However if, like me, you’re the type to figure things out quickly then get annoyed when it takes the character the entire book to come to the same conclusion, you may want to give this one a pass. If you’re a more patient reader than me, then this might not bother you. Like I said above, there were some aspects of it that I liked, and the characters were the real reason I kept reading.

We’ll Never Be Apart was read as part of ARC August hosted by Read.Sleep.Repeat. You can find more on the books I read during ARC August here.