Truly Devious // Review

Author: Maureen Johnson
Published On: January 16, 2018
Publisher: HarperCollins
Genre: YA, Mystery
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Synopsis:

Ellingham Academy is a famous private school in Vermont for the brightest thinkers, inventors, and artists. It was founded by Albert Ellingham, an early twentieth century tycoon, who wanted to make a wonderful place full of riddles, twisting pathways, and gardens. “A place,” he said, “where learning is a game.”

Shortly after the school opened, his wife and daughter were kidnapped. The only real clue was a mocking riddle listing methods of murder, signed with the frightening pseudonym “Truly, Devious.” It became one of the great unsolved crimes of American history.

True-crime aficionado Stevie Bell is set to begin her first year at Ellingham Academy, and she has an ambitious plan: She will solve this cold case. That is, she will solve the case when she gets a grip on her demanding new school life and her housemates: the inventor, the novelist, the actor, the artist, and the jokester. But something strange is happening. Truly Devious makes a surprise return, and death revisits Ellingham Academy. The past has crawled out of its grave. Someone has gotten away with murder. 

Am I turning into a mystery reader now?

This is the second YA mystery book I’ve ready in the past few months, making it the second YA mystery book I’ve read ever.

This book was…fun. It’s been nagging at me for awhile now, and I finally picked it up one fall night in the hopes that it would pull me out of my romance kick. It did. I finished it in about two days, and have the sequel sitting next to me ready to go!

• The juxtaposition between past and present. This novel switches between the original time period of the murders, 1936, and present day, where Stevie is attending the boarding school. At first I was put off by the dual timeline thing because I tend to find myself wanting one more than the other, but as the mystery progressed, I was craving these glimpses into the past and getting to slowly unravel the Ellingham case along with Stevie.

• Ellingham itself was a cool concept and I enjoyed the way that it was set up. I feel like boarding school stories can oftentimes lean to heavily in one direction (plot, characters, and setting,) and let the others fall to the wayside, but with this story I felt I had a good grasp of all three. I liked that we got to follow Stevie from arrival – the reader learned the ins and outs of Ellingham along with her, which was a fun adventure.

• The writing style was compact and made for easy reading. Since I’ve recently discovered that I might, possibly, maybe-one-day, tentatively try my hand at novel writing, I was more cognizant of the writing style used in this and how Johnson used third person to connect us to our character and the plot. I found that I liked Johnson’s way of getting us into Stevie’s head while also not letting us take anything too seriously. While I think Stevie made some choices that were not necessarily the brightest, I did enjoy her internal monologue and the lens through which she fed us the story.

• The characters felt very underdeveloped. Which, to be fair, can be tricky in a mystery (as I’m learning by horribly attempting to write one) because you have to introduce enough characters that when it comes down to narrowing the suspect, the reader doesn’t immediately know who did it. However, everyone in this story felt so half-fleshed out. I don’t know, maybe I’m reading too many YA mysteries these days and become a ~snob~, but I didn’t connect with any of the characters on the level that made me think “I need the next book ASAP!”.

• David is the most confusing character I’ve ever read. What is his goals? As queen Ari would say, what is your motivation, boy? He was so rude and hurtful to Stevie (at least she made us think he was), only for him to go on being the love interest? Like where the hell did those random kisses come from? They’d flip from hating each other to being all over each other in every. single. romantic scene. I don’t get it, and I don’t really care about it.

• The mystery felt anticlimactic. I pretty much guessed the culprit from the halfway point, and saw that cliffhanger coming from a mile away. The fact that David was so wishy-washy about his parents (another confusing aspect of him that felt unnecessary) had me guessing, and I happened to guess correctly. I also don’t like that we basically left two big mysteries hanging – I’d at least hoped we’d solve the present-day one, which we sorta did, sorta didn’t.

• This is a small thing, but Vi’s pronouns. Mild spoiler here, but Vi is introduced as Janelle’s love interest, and Stevie initially refers to Vi as “her”, which Janelle quickly corrects to “them”. We love to see the sapphic and nonbinary rep!! However, Stevie goes on to refer to Vi as “she” twice more after this conversation. To be fair, I don’t think this was intentional on the authors part, but just a bit frustrating that she introduced nonbinary rep only for it to be disregarded later on.

• One last super small thing, I promise! They refer to the villain in this book as “Truly Devious” because of a letter he/she/they left before committing the crime. However, the letter is actually signed “Truly, Devious” with the truly being like a “sincerely”. So wouldn’t that make the murders name just Devious?

This book was the definition of a solid, three stars. I didn’t love it, I didn’t hate it, I just casually enjoyed it. I do have an urge to continue on to the second one, though I checked it out of the library before I decide if I’d like to buy a personal copy. This also feels like one of those series where if I don’t continue it in the next month, it’ll fall to the side and probably get lost among the chaos and downfall that is my TBR.

My rating:

Have you read the Truly Devious books? What were your favorite parts of this story?

Thanks, friends!!