All Fall Down

I remember reading Ally Carter years ago in middle school. I was in an espionage phase, where I wanted to read any kind of spy book I could get my hands on. That was why I read her Gahallager Girls series of books, despite my not being the target audience. As time went on, I forgot about them and continued to read other books. Now, as an adult, I saw her next book All Fall Down get some decent press, so, when I saw it at Goodwill, I decided to pick it up. Now, seeing her writing style in the eyes of an adult, I can see both why I liked her writing, and why I eventually fell out of favor with it.

The best element of the book is how Grace is trying to come to grips with her Mother's death. As the book opens, we find that she is moving back to the US Embassy in a fictional country, and she is still reeling from the death of her mother, which she saw firsthand. She believes that her mother did not die in a fire, like everyone believes, she thinks that she was murdered. She is determined to put it behind her and work with the other kids who go to the other various embassies until she sees a man who she thinks murdered her mother working right inside the US Embassy itself. As things unfold, Grace not only has to question if the man actually murdered her mother but if her mother was murdered at all.

Grace is trying to come to grips with this, as well as her own mental well-being. Thinking that you saw your mother die is no small thing, and we see her and her friends and family try and come to grips with this. While I won't spoil how this plot line is resolved, I will only say that the twist resolution is one that I found put a whole new spin on everything we had been told, in a satisfying way.

Then there was the setting. The idea of so many embassies so close together (they are placed more like apartment houses, than actual land of other countries)may be unrealistic, but I could still get behind it for the sake of seeing all of these kids from different cultures act together.

Sadly, that is all that really impressed me with this book, and even then they all seemed half-baked ideas, at best.

We don't get a solid look at Grace and her character to understand what she is like when she sees people she wants to impress. Even her good interactions with friends can be boiled down to snarky comments that I have seen in other YA books. Then there are moments that feel irredeemable to me. For example, she sees a popular beautiful girl walking toward her at a party. Grace then proceeds, without so much as a ‘hello', to tear the girl down, saying she (the popular girl) is just a shallow person who desperately wants people to like her because all she has is her looks. This seems way too judgemental for my taste and made me dislike Grace more than the girl she was tearing down.

Then there is the setting. Since it is set in a fictional country, you would think that this would give the author some freedom to do whatever she wanted with the location. Set on the shores of the Mediterranean, it would be a great place to have a fun history and unique locations. Yet, other than a few looks at the other Embassies, we hardly see anything outside of this. It makes for a wasted opportunity.

So, in the end, this fast-paced spy thriller turned out to be more of a dud than I wanted it to be. While I think it was a nice change of pace, I don't think I'll remember anything about it a month from now. Into the Unhaul pile it goes. I give it a two out of five.