Review: All Fall Down (Embassy Row, #1) by Ally Carter

All Fall Down by Ally Carter

My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Received: Borrowed
Publication Date: January 20th 2015
Publisher: Scholastic Press
Point of View: 1st Person & Feminine
Recommended Age: 13+
Pacing: Past
Genres &  Themes: Young Adult, Contemporary, Mystery, Suspense, Action, Espionage, Crime, Family

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BLURB:

Grace Blakely is absolutely certain of three things:

1. She is not crazy.
2. Her mother was murdered.
3. Someday she is going to find the killer and make him pay.

As certain as Grace is about these facts, nobody else believes her — so there’s no one she can completely trust. Not her grandfather, a powerful ambassador. Not her new friends, who all live on Embassy Row. Not Alexei, the Russian boy next door, who is keeping his eye on Grace for reasons she neither likes nor understands.

Everybody wants Grace to put on a pretty dress and a pretty smile, blocking out all her unpretty thoughts. But they can’t control Grace — no more than Grace can control what she knows or what she needs to do. Her past has come back to hunt her . . . and if she doesn’t stop it, Grace isn’t the only one who will get hurt. Because on Embassy Row, the countries of the world stand like dominoes, and one wrong move can make them all fall down.

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All Fall Down may not be Ally Carter’s best work, but it’s still, as always with this author, darn fast-paced, entertaining and original.

The moment I started reading it, I was sucked into the world of ambassadors and soirées and danger.

Grace lost her mom. Correction—her mom was murdered. They all say it was an accident, but Grace knows the truth.

She was there.

And she knows who killed her.

She wants to make him pay, and she will.

I found the whole concept of ambassadors from all over the world who live next to one another—on a street called ‘‘Embassy Row’’—very unique. I never read anything similar to it.

Sure, the mystery and murder lacked complexity—usually, with a murder, we have multiple suspects, but in this book, it’s limited to one. Therefore, it’s more suspenseful than mysterious.

I nonetheless felt unspeakably engaged into the story, despite the immaturity of the characters, the lackluster romance and, as I said, the limited mystery to the murder of Grace’s mother.

Ally Carter knows how to write a book in a way that will make the reader not want to stop reading. Her chapters are not too long, her writing is simple—maybe too simple—and her characters fun and somewhat relatable, though sadly I personally cannot relate to (slightly) immature teens.

I’m usually not that interested in reading the sequel to a book I only gave three stars to, but that’s exactly how I feel right now.

The story ends on a huge cliffhanger, so you’ll want to have the next book beside you after you’re done with this one.

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