REVIEW: How to Survive Your Murder (book) by Danielle Valentine

How to Survive Your Murder is a YA thriller. I bought my copy new.

Review:

Alice's sister Claire was murdered on Halloween, and Alice saw it happen. A year later, she's about to take the stand as a witness in the trial of Claire's killer when she meets a girl who looks exactly like Scream's Sidney Prescott. NotSidney says she's an angel and sends Alice back in time to go after her sister in the cornfield maze where she was murdered, so that she can finally learn the truth about what really happened that night.

This has loads of horror movie references and yet is conspicuously missing any mention of Happy Death Day, a movie with a similar premise. Anyway, this was an impulse purchase that I expected would be mediocre at best. I did not predict how angry it would end up making me.

Alice may take the prize for heroine with the worst friends. Prior to Claire's death, Alice and her friends had been planning some kind of horror movie-related podcast. After Claire's death, they started the podcast without her and made its focus true crimes looked at through the lens of horror movies - basically, what could the victims of these crimes have done to better align with horror movie rules that might have allowed them to survive? If that isn't horrible enough, one of the victims they talk about, against Alice's wishes, is Claire.

Alice's crush on Wes didn't make much more sense than her friendships. The author tried really hard to convince readers that Wes was some kind of mysterious hottie, but mostly he just sounded like some kind of weird loner.

Really, though, he was bait intended to convince readers that this was going to wrap up with a cliched and mediocre ending. Instead, the ending was utterly unhinged and aggravating. I don't even know where to begin. It only made sense in the most shallow way - there were holes you could drive a truck through, and about a billion unanswered questions. The bonus chapter didn't add anything to the story and, in fact, somehow just made things worse.

Extras:

Bonus chapter (do some editions of this book not have this chapter? I wasn't sure what made it a bonus) and a Q&A with the author (where Happy Death Day is mentioned).