Review: Unspeakable

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