Name: With Malice
Rating: 3.492307692307692 (65 reviews)
ISBN: 9780544805095

Eileen Cook

Eighteen-year-old Jill Charron wakes up in a hospital, unable to remember the past six weeks, including the accident that killed her best friend, if it was, in fact, an accident.

With Malice

Melissa Palmer

Book #46 Read in 2016
With Malice by Eileen Cook

Eighteen year olds Jill and Simone have been friends for ever and in the spring semester of their senior year, the pair heads to Italy for an academic tour. Only one makes it home....there is a horrible car accident which kills Simone and badly injures Jill. But was it really an accident? Italian authorities are looking at it as murder and at Jill as the murderer. Jill does not remember anything about the accident so it is a mystery as to what really happened. This book is full of twists and turns and is an engaging read. I received a copy of this book from Amazon Vine in exchange for a honest review.

Victoria

Two words: incredibly dragging. I have been in a reading slump for literal months and I started reading this book about a month and a half ago but only got around to finishing it today. I thought it was going to pull me out of the slump back then but naaaah.

I really didn't like this book. The plot was meh. The characters were meh. And the ending was absolutely disappointing. Nope.

eliz

wasn’t too engaging for a mystery thriller book and the ending ruined everything even more

Emelie

1,5owls

This was not good!! It was just repetitive and boring, even though i skimmed the middle i still got the end, The plot twist was not surprising.. Etc, etc!

Dee B. 

This book was exactly what I needed to read right now. A refreshing break from YA Romance. 

 A girl does what she has to.

I love thriller/mystery novels like this. With Malice kept me a step behind all the way up to the final two chapters, and I never would have seen it coming. Jill, our protaganist, has certainly been through more than her fair share of trials but it's clear that she came out of it a changed woman. I loved the writing style and the character growth. Overall, I wouldn't shy away from another Eileen Cook novel.

If you liked 
  
 then you might like this one.

yerin

Cath

Actual rating: 2.5/5 stars

I have really mixed feelings about this book…. It’s mostly somewhat negative.

Now, I don’t normally pick up thrillers, let alone Psychological ones which promotes neurological illnesses. So I thought With Malice would be a fresh new read for me. It’s a YA book, it has an intriguing plot, and I’ve been seeing it EVERYWHERE on social media. Plus the cover’s absolutely stunning, so I just had to pick it up.

Sigh. The story was draggy and frustrating. It wasn’t in any way fast paced. Not for me that is. I thought I’d like the idea the of a story told through a series of interviews and documents, but I was wrong. I ended up skimming the whole thing. It was painful, to say the least. I was only able to take in the less chunkier ones, and even then I still had to force myself to read everything through. I was in no way invested to the story half way through it. The plot promised so much, but nothing I read lived up to it. The blurb “..Because the accident… wasn’t just an accident” was honestly a bit too misleading. It sounded saucy and bold, unlike the story itself. The main character was just drowning in misery throughout the whole story. There was just no positive development. Even though everything unravelled flawless in the end (the one thing that made me bump up the star rating), the characters remained bland and tedious. Very disappointing.

The only character I liked in the book was Anna, Jill’s rehab friend. She was the only tolerable character in the book and probably the only one I enjoyed reading about. She was such a relatable character too. She wasn’t prissy like Jill . Both girls went through equally traumatic events, but it was evident that Anna was stronger. Jill did not have the ferocity I had in mine. She completely lacked color.

I thought the ending was a bit too abrupt, but the twist was…well, it made up for the story, thank goodness. But I was overall really disappointed with the book. Everything else just seemed pointless in the end. I gasped a little and then shrugged it off like it was nothing. But hey, it’s got a great cover, I’ll give you that!

Genesis (@whisperingchapters)

This review was originally posted on Latte Nights Reviews.

Jill wakes up in a hospital, covered in bruises and wounds, without any idea of how she got them. The police are investigating her for the murder of her best friend. Unfortunately, the last few months of her life have been wiped clean.

“It doesn’t matter what’s true — what matters is what people believe.”

I considered Jill to be an unreliable character. She has no recollection of what happened and her doctor tells her that some memories she could recover are possibly not real—I doubted everything she thought about. I was so confused about everyone's motives. It was so hard trying to piece everything together. At one point, I did suspect the ending, but it was for a fleeting second.

You can't tell anything about a person when things are great. If you want to really know someone, be there when everything goes to hell.

I honestly enjoyed the whole story. It kept me on my toes, it had the right amount of suspense and I really liked that the main character was unreliable. I had problems with the ending. Everything is revealed and suddenly, the end. I felt like it was cut off short. On one hand, I understand the abrupt ending because it's actually fitting to how everything was unraveled; on the other, the abruptness didn't give way to a completion or justice, I would say. I can't really say more without spoiling the ending.

With Malice is a good YA thriller with a good dose of unreliable-ness to keep the story very intriguing. 

Thanks to Tonya from Lilybloombooks for gifting me this copy!

This review was originally posted on Latte Nights Reviews.

With Malice

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