Blog Tour: The Window| Review + Giveaway

The Window by Amelia Brunskill
Publisher: Delacorte Press
Release Date: April 3, 2018

Genre: Young Adult, Contemporary, Mystery, Thriller

Synopsis:

Anna is everything her identical twin is not. Outgoing and athletic, she is the opposite of quiet introvert Jess. The same on the outside, yet so completely different inside–it’s hard to believe the girls are sisters, let alone twins. But they are. And they tell each other everything.

Or so Jess thought.

After Anna falls to her death while sneaking out her bedroom window, Jess’s life begins to unravel. Everyone says it was an accident, but to Jess, that doesn’t add up. Where was Anna going? Who was she meeting? And how long had Anna been lying to her?

Jess is compelled to learn everything she can about the sister she thought she knew. At first it’s a way to stay busy and find closure . . . but Jess soon discovers that her twin kept a lot of secrets. And as she digs deeper, she learns that the answers she’s looking for may be truths that no one wants her to uncover.

Because Anna wasn’t the only one with secrets.

Amelia Brunskill was born in Melbourne, Australia, but she grew up mostly in Washington state where she picked a lot of blackberries, read a lot of books, and failed to properly appreciate the epic beauty of the mountains and the Pacific ocean.

She earned her bachelors degrees in psychology and art from the University of Washington and her master in information studies from the University of Texas at Austin. She now lives in Chicago, where she eats as much Thai food as possible and works as a librarian.

The Window is her debut novel.

My Review: This is a story about a girl named Jess whose twin sister is found dead from sneaking out her window. Jess doesn’t believe that is the case and begins to start an investigation on her own. Slowly secrets about her sister begin to unravel. She soon finds out her sister ended up keeping a lot more from her than she realized. Jess will do anything though to find out the truth about her sister.

Right away I was super interested in this book from the cover alone. I feel it is very simplistic but it gives off that mystery/thriller vibe. I really liked how they turned the o in window into an actual window. I feel it was a very smart choice on the cover designers part.

The next thing I really enjoyed was the main character, Jess. I really liked her determination to find out what ended up having to her sister. She ended up finding out things I sure her sister would have liked to be kept a secret. I know it hurt her knowing that her sister hid these things from her. Even though that was the case she decided to continue on with her search anything. The only one thing I didn’t really agree with is her spying on this one character. She would go to that person’s house and would stare into their window trying to uncover this theory she had. I felt that was a huge invasion of personal space and wasn’t right on her part. The whole time I was dying for her to get caught so I didn’t have to read about those scenes anymore.

Another thing about this book I really enjoyed was the romance. It wasn’t a huge part of the book but I was really rooting for the two characters. I felt like they had a good thing going. I felt it was a nice distraction from everything else that was going on.

The last thing I enjoyed about this book was you got short paragraphs from Anna’s point of view. She would make little comments about certain things. I really enjoyed seeing what was going on in her head about certain situations. They really added to the mystery of the book. She would say certain things and it really had me questioning what she meant. Plus you could tell she really cared about Jess and felt bad about keeping these secrets from her.

One thing I didn’t like was how slow paced this book was. I felt I would constantly be waiting for something more to happen. Thankfully the chapters weren’t too long that I ended up flying through them so I wasn’t a huge deal. I was curious to what actually happened to her sister and continued on with the book anyway.

Overall I thought this was a decent book. Even though at times it was slow paced I was still shocked at the end by what actually happened. I would check out another book from this author. I would love to see what she comes up with next.

Quotes

“The strange thing about the worst day of your life, the day that changes everything, is you have to live through all of it moment by moment.”

“Their desire was a joke, because we didn’t want them back. Even if we had, she had a boyfriend and I, I had common sense. I believed that back then.”

“Where life was concerned the options were binary. You were alive or not alive.”

“Never thought anything I did could be used against you.”

“-the silence so between them so loud it threatened to shatter everything in the room.”