Review: The Masked Truth by Kelley Armstrong (Goodreads Author)

The Masked Truth by Kelley Armstrong
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

1,5 stars

I am a big fan of Kelley Armstrong’s The Otherworld Series and after reading some of my GR friends reviews, which were mostly positive, decided to read her latest YA book, The Masked Truth.

By the time I had read a few chapters, I thought…hey this reminds me of something like The Breakfast Club movie!! Remember, a group of “troubled” teenagers are stuck in detention together and for the next hour and half, we get to listen to all their woes and tribulations and they get to know each other….

in The Masked Truth, we have a group of troubled teens who are going to spend a weekend of therapy together with their respective psychiatrists in a closed off derelict office building, cut off from the outside world and work out their issues!!! Within a very short time, they are taken hostage by masked gunman, who the teenagers give the most ridiculous names to!!!!

No, I don’t think I’m into this story!! But, okay, let’s try a few more pages….no….nothing is grabbing at me…

Allright, close the book….maybe come back to it later! After all, how can so many readers be wrong about this book? Everyone is raving about it.

A couple of days later…..let’s give it another try!!! Maybe there’s something here that will get me to say….OhMyGee…I was so wrong…this is fabulous! But NO…..NO…..NO…..Total disbelief……that’s what I felt as the pages turned….

Let me tell you why:

The characters:

Riley Vasquez can’t deal with the fall-out of not being able to help the family she was babysitting for being murdered and feels guilty about how she hid away with their young daughter instead of coming to their aid. OMG…her constant internalization that she’s not the hero people make her out to be and brushing off anyone who tells her they admire her courage…..hell, I just wanted to tell her to…

And she learnt how to be a hostage negotiator from her now dead SWAT member dad!!!! Wow, he must have been an amazing teacher!!!

Max is quite an odd character.

British accented schizophrenia sufferer, who just by the way, was the only one I liked…..despite the rambling musings he kept having over and over again…..some of the chapters are told in his third-person POV which drove me batty trying to make sense of what he was thinking….

The plot

Over half the storyline takes place in the office building and Max and Riley and some of the other hostages, if not having been shot and killed off, spend most of their time running down corridors, up the stairs, through office doors and more office doors, whilst dodging the rather inept hostage taking gunmen!! Back and forward, from one exit door to another….hell, these poor kids…..


Just then, the setting changes…okay, I can’t say more…don’t want to do any spoilers here…..and that’s where my disbelief made my mouth open wide wide wide……..is this for real??? Is it at all remotely possible that these things can actually happen?

Yes, there are a lot of twists and turns and huge red herrings but when anything is revealed….I was like…NO, WHAT!!!!!

I am sure there are a lot more readers out there who will like this book….but me….hell, by the last page, I was a total ……wreck

I gave an extra ½ star because ---- I did like Max and Riley together!!!

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