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

roro

this book was incredibly intense. It left me on edge after almost every chapter. The journey throughout the book was very intriguing. There wasn't a clear stance at the end of the book but overall I really enjoyed it.

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.

denise

really thought jillsimone would’ve been like annaelise but i was wrong :(

Nessa Luna

Actual Rating: 3,5 stars. The ending felt a bit... meh? Will try to write a review soon.

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

PRETTY MURDEROUS SHIP WITH UGLY NAMES WE LOVE YOU!!

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!

Sven Test

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.

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.

Melissa Deitrick

This story felt like an Amanda Knox rip off - at least change the country! The author leads you into different scenarios that lead you to believe differently about the situations and characters originally presented but the ending felt like a cop out. None of the characters were like able imo and lacked any sort of depth. 

The only pro I could find is that it was an insanely quick read as so much space was taken up to “document” the interviews with time stamps, names, etc. This would have been a DNF if it was any longer.

yerin

Allyson Marrs

Definitely reminiscent of Amanda Knox's story, which prevented me from giving this 5 stars since the author could have at least tried to be more original, but gripping nonetheless. The mini twist at the end was a bit chilling. Fast, intriguing read.

Nicole

Rating: 4 Stars

Wow, this book was so good! It was thrilling, engaging, and that ending was perfect! I am really looking forward to writing up a review for this one. 

Review coming soon to my blog!

mycozynook1.wordpress.com

Gabriela Roxana 

"It doesn't matter what's true-what matters is what people believe"


OH.MY.GOD.
It's been a while since I enjoyed a book this much.
With Malice tells the story of Jill,an 18-year old brilliant student ,Yale admitted.She wakes up on a hospital bad with no recollections of the past 6 weeks of her life to find out she has already went to the holiday she had planned for so long. Moreover,she's prosecuted for a crime she has no recollections of : the murder of her best friends.And against every proof,she knows she could have never kill her best friend...or could she?
While many people compared this book with Dangerous Girls , the later being my personal favorite of these two, I truly believe the two books to be very distinct and unique in their own way. While DA deals with guilt and poetic justice,as well as putting a good show for the people,With Malice treats a much more sensitive and reliable truth : our past is a mere reflection of how we choose to remember it.And sometimes,we can start to believe some things happened when they are just the work of our imagination.
This book was a real coaster for me.I read the second half holding my breathe,and I reached the ending feeling fully satisfied.Although I guess that I was the only one who had a different view on the ending . (view spoiler)[ I don't believe that Jill purposely tried to kill herself and her best friend.I believe she just lost control of the wheel and jumped out of the edge as she was scared and she didn't really pay attention to the road anymore.  (hide spoiler)]
As being said,a truly enjoyable read.Even funny at times.

  "Heck,maybe Simone wasn't stabbed.Maybe she fell on the knife"

Yeah sure.

I reccomend it to everyone who is looking for an amazing new gripping thriller,with an amazing,unwillingly unreliable narrator.

Lisa ✩ @lifeinlit

Jill woke up in a hospital bed, badly wounded and unable to walk, with absolutely no recollection of how she got there. She's informed that she was on a trip to Italy, got into a car accident, and was rushed back home to a hospital to be taken care of. Jill learns she's actually love the entirety of the prior six weeks. SIX WEEK, zero memory. She's absolutely devastated when she finds out that her best friend, Simone, had actually gone on the trip with her, and ended up dying in the car accident. Right when it can't get any worse, it does... the authorities are thinking that it wasn't an accident and that Jill is somehow responsible for the accident, and therefore Simone's death.

This story is told through Jill's point of view for the majority, but also included are newspaper articles, interviews, blog posts, tv interviews, etc. from others' points of view, which was such a wonderful addition to this story. Since Jill has no memory of the incident, causing her to be an unreliable narrator, as the reader it's wonderful to have these added tidbits. I loved hearing others' thoughts on the relationship between Jill and Simone, and then trying to decide if they were being sincere or had an ulterior motive.

Though With Malice has been compared to Dangerous Girls, and I suppose I can see the slight similarities, I don't think the stories were all that similar. Yes, they both were about friends and murder, both with a few similarities to the Amanda Knox case, other than that these stories felt quite different to me. IF you're looking for a fun mystery to keep you engaged and guessing throughout, I'd definitely recommend this one.

Audiobook Impressions:
This is my first audio narrated by Whitney Dykhouse. I really enjoyed how well she portrayed Jill's confusion and frustration throughout her amnesia. She also did a great job of performing the different characters through the additional content (i.e.: articles, interviews, blog posts, etc.) and had my mind going a mile a minute trying to unravel it all through the entire story. I'd definitely recommend the audio for this story. It's a very quick read, and one you'll want to listen straight through in its entirety.
 

  


(Thanks to Brilliance Audio for the review copy!)

Find this review and others like it at Lost in Literature!

 Bruna Acioly Leão

Meh.

This book is about Jill, who has just woken up after a car accident that injured her and killed her best friend Simone in Italy. The problem is that Jill can't remember the past six weeks and everyone is saying that she cause the accident on purpose, with the intent of killing Simone. Now she has to try to get her memories back and prove her innocence.

I was looking for an interesting thriller/mystery to read and while this book did keep me intrigued and turning the pages, it wasn't really anything special or particularly memorable.
Admittedly, I have a harder time connecting with mysteries than I do with any other genre, which is weird, because as a kid/teenager, I enjoyed reading them a lot. Maybe that is why actually, maybe I have enjoyed mysteries in the past when I was more interested in plot and figuring out a puzzle, but nowadays, I want to care about the characters and be fascinated by a beautiful writing style.

The characters were bland in this one, and felt generic and one-dimensional. Jill and Simone's friendship felt like every other toxic relationship you read about in these kind of modern mystery books. Everyone else in the book was just filler content.

The writing style in this book was good. I liked that Jill was an unreliable narrator and I liked (view spoiler)[how creepy she gets in the end after remembering that she did kill Simone. It was refreshing.  (hide spoiler)]. However, there were some parts about the story being told in different formats, like blog posts and comments and media coverage of the crime that I didn't like. The guide book parts were plain boring and the media opinions felt too much like reading coverage of a real crime, and while I do like fiction crime well enough, I don't care to read about it when it happens it real life. I find true crime like that kind of icky, to be honest (not all the time, I can appreciate investigative journalism if done tastefully, but still, that was not the case). I know this was fictional media used, but I don't know, I didn't really resonate with it, and some of it felt out of place. Maybe if it had been mixed with Jill's narration more, having her read what was being said, it would have been more palatable.

Anyway, I was interested in the case enough during most of the book, but the ending (view spoiler)[ with Jill actually being the one who drove them both into the cliff (hide spoiler)] was a little bit disappointing. It didn't feel like a satisfying or reasonable conclusion for me. I don't know. I had fun reading this book, but I feel like it didn't leave any special marks on my reading life.

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!