REVIEW | All Fall Down by Ally Carter

The Deets:

Title: All Fall Down
Author: Ally Carter
Series?: Book 1 of Embassy Row
Genre: Contemporary, Mystery
Big Issues: Sanity
Rating: ★★☆☆☆

Goodreads Summary:

A new series of global proportions -- from master of intrigue, NEW YORK TIMES bestselling author Ally Carter.

Grace Blakely is absolutely certain of three things:

1. She is not crazy.
2. Her mother was murdered.
3. Someday she is going to find the killer and make him pay.

As certain as Grace is about these facts, nobody else believes her -- so there's no one she can completely trust. Not her grandfather, a powerful ambassador. Not her new friends, who all live on Embassy Row. Not Alexei, the Russian boy next door, who is keeping his eye on Grace for reasons she neither likes nor understands.

Everybody wants Grace to put on a pretty dress and a pretty smile, blocking out all her unpretty thoughts. But they can't control Grace -- no more than Grace can control what she knows or what she needs to do. Her past has come back to hunt her . . . and if she doesn't stop it, Grace isn't the only one who will get hurt. Because on Embassy Row, the countries of the world stand like dominoes, and one wrong move can make them all fall down.


This book contains some of my least favorite tropes in YA.

1) Girls hating girls - CHECK. Grace's new best friend's twin sister is written as an absolute bitch for no good reason. Grace hates her. Grace is hated right back. Why? What is the point? This isn't necessary. Just. Stop. Doing. This.

2) Faux action girls - CHECK. Grace is out to seek revenge on her mother's murderer. However, she is the only one who actually believes she was murdered. Grace's sanity is in question. But, for being emotionally unstable and the lot, I didn't get that in her character. I felt like was written like any other character who is out to make something right, to fix something, to unleash some great plan. Grace makes dumb decisions, gets herself lost, gets herself captured by other countries on the Row (multiple times), and it's all for naught because of the...

3) Bad pacing and too many plot twists - CHECK. All of the real action comes towards the end of the book. But, then, we are sent on a wild goose chase to see what is reality or not. The twists weren't even that exciting to me. I didn't like how it was revealed that the Scarred Man is just some sad old lover of Grace's mom, wahwahwah, I don't care. I just couldn't bring myself to care.

The romance in this one is pretty nonexistent, which is good for me; however, when it did appear, it was a smidge instant. Throughout most of the book, Grace can't stand Alexei. She just doesn't like him anymore. She hates him because her brother told him to watch out for her and blahblahblah. But, then, in the span of just a few quick pages, she's apparently into him??? Going on and on about how they just fit together or something. It was really weird. And then it disappeared again. So. Not sure about that one.

I liked the characters of Noah and Rosie. Grace is an unreliable narrator, for sure, and I tend to enjoy that if written the right way but I just couldn't get behind her character.

The world was meh. For being set in the fictional country of Adria, we certainly did focus on just a few real and familiar countries the whole time, didn't we? How are you gonna write a book about an Embassy Row, set in a fictional country, and still have it read so boring and lackluster? Give me more. Please. The cultures and ideas and people that we could have met throughout this book... ugh. Such potential. Instead we get a bunch of lame kids who still seem to be pretty basic and expected.

How many times can one girl say "the man who killed my mother?" How many different ways can she say it? Answer: a lot. This is just nitpicking, I suppose.

Overall, a book that could have been an enjoyable enough read but fell really short of the mark.