Unspeakable
Author: Abbie Rushton
Publication Date: February 5th 2015
Publisher: Atom
~A copy was provided by the publisher in exchange for an honest review~
Megan doesn't speak. She hasn't spoken in months.
Pushing away the people she cares about is just a small price to pay. Because there are things locked inside Megan's head - things that are screaming to be heard - that she cannot, must not, let out.
Then Jasmine starts at school: bubbly, beautiful, talkative Jasmine. And for reasons Megan can't quite understand, life starts to look a bit brighter.
Megan would love to speak again, and it seems like Jasmine might be the answer. But if she finds her voice, will she lose everything else?
Going into Unspeakable, since the cover is so vague, I was
expecting the aftermath of a rape story, a trauma or maybe something to do with OCD for the
reason why Megan suddenly stopped speaking. Then we get to know a little why
she stopped, the vague details
anyway, but you know that's not the
reason why. I was expecting something different.
I didn't get different.
What I ended up thinking would be something ala Abigail
Haas, we got nowhere near close to it. For me Unspeakable played too much on
the what-happened-to-make-Megan-stop-speaking, and in essence,
what-did-she-do-that-was-so-bad-to-her-best-friend? You spend so much time thinking up what she
could've done, since with all the little hints we get make it seem worse than
it actually is, and once the truth was revealed and wrapped up with a nice
little bow a chapter or two away from the end, it fell flat. It also made it
implausible and predictable , there's the transparent character, which I found
rather unbelievable how Megan didn't figure it out sooner, it's obvious. So the
"mystery" aspect of the story wasn't a mystery at all. And then there's the why she thought she had
done something. No matter how drunk you were, you're not going to forget something
like that. Even if it's days after it happened when bits and pieces come back
to you. You can argue shock, memory loss from the trauma, etc, but since
Unspeakable never delved into the psychological effects, I'm calling it like I
read it.
I liked the characters enough, you could hear Megan's voice, which when you
think about it, is kind of ironic since she doesn't even speak for three
quarters of it. Jasmines a little...too much, and then there's Luke, whose
basically a cardboard cut out, an angry one at that, that's it. Oh, and can't
forget Sadie now, can I? The bitch of a character that's unnecessarily an awful
person for no reason. Look, if I wanted a rerun of Mean Girls, I'd watch it.
Give me a proper reason. I'm all for
diversity, and we're seeing more #LGBTQ in YA Fiction, but here's my problem
with it in Unspeakable. It seemed out of place, probably because I couldn't
feel anything between Megan and Jasmine no spark, no click. To be honest, I
didn't even care about the characters, take the revelation. The revelation
that's supposed to be intense, keep you on edge, keep you thinking if someone's
going to die, and all I thought was, There
you go, off to die now, bye.
Unspeakable, for what it's worth, is an okay quick read, and
addictive, but there's no depth to the characters, no surprises or twists and considering
the main character is a mute, the story ended up being not a story I haven't read before.
Rating: 3/5
