Name: What the Other Three Don't Know
ISBN: 9781629727325

Spencer Hyde

When a loner, a jock, an outsider, and an Internet influencer go river rafting together for a school assignment, the four strangers end up sharing their secrets and relying on each other when the trip turns dangerous.

What the Other Three Don't Know

Actual rating: 2.5 stars

What the Other Three Don't Know, for me, was a book that had a lot of good things. But the overall execution was not one of those.

More than anything - I've heard this story before. We have a Breakfast Club-esque group of teenagers who are thrown together in an unwanted situation. In this case, a white water rafting trip. They are all dealing with secrets and as they realize they aren't all as horrible as they once thought, they open up and begin to accept each other.

Don't get me wrong. The representation is good. I don't know the last time I read a book featuring a character with alopecia, for example. But there was a real lack of depth to these diversities that were the core of the story. I felt as though we only got the surface of what the different circumstances each teen shared within the story.

In addition, the dialogue was... something. It becomes a feature in the story that the MC has a love of vocabulary and crossword puzzles. While this is a nice quirk, the over-the-top dialogue that results from this is just silly. Kids don't speak like a crossword hint. They just don't.

Overall, this book just didn't add anything to the conversation of diversity. It tried. But it did not execute. A nice enough read, but there are better recommendations out there that share a similar story, in my honest opinion.



Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for providing me with an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review!

What the Other Three Don't Know

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