Two for Joy by Zoe Sugg & Amy McCulloch

The end of a mystery… Spoilers ahead!

Themes: YA mystery/thriller

The synopsis

Audrey and Ivy, determined to bring their fellow student Lola Radcliffe’s killer to justice, find themselves in the middle of another mystery when a friend disappears in suspicious circumstances.

Their only clue is a mysterious card left by the enigmatic Magpie Society. With time running out and the police baffled, Audrey and Ivy must delve deeper than ever into the dark secrets that their school is hiding.

But someone is playing a deadly game. And to beat them, Audrey and Ivy have to start rewriting the rules… 

The review – SPOILERS AHEAD!

To be honest, this book was a 3 stars for me until I reached the end. The writing is not the greatest and feels very YA as are the characters which are a bit one-dimensional and lack depth. It felt a bit repetitive and long at times, and I did not really know where the authors wanted to go which was a bit confusing, even for a mystery.

But the end… Oh God! It was totally unexpected and especially awful (it even surprised me to find this type of end in a YA novel). To be honest, I was uneasy when finishing the book and the feeling lingered for a few days. However, I really enjoyed the twist and the fact that all the clues that I picked up, thinking ‘Oh, this is weird’ but then forgot, were finally reminded to me and made sense. The revelation is even worse than you have been following her POV during two books and that her thoughts were the ones of a normal teenage girl that you cannot imagine giving a death this awful to the one supposed to be her best friend.

In brief: even if this is not the greatest book ever written, I think the end makes its value. The authors succeeded in leaving me with questions such as will Audrey really die this way and will Ivy be finally caught? There are also two things that feel a bit unfinished or incoherent: the first one is the all story between Audrey and Alicia, since it had been hinted that there was more to the story than what we had learned in the first book. The incoherent part is why Ivy decided to save Audrey from Mr Willis while she had already trapped him and Audrey’s death would have just reinforced her plan?

My rating: 4/5