All Your Twisted Secrets – Diana Urban

This book was written in 2020 by author Diana Urban, who just recently started her writing, and I just loved the amount of surprises, character influence, the setting and plot overall. It was a very high pressure thriller with just the right hint of revenge that made me flip through the pages easily and it made me want to read the entire book in one day, as I kept spending time on my computer, scrolling through the entire 273 page PDF that I had downloaded and kept open on my web browser for the span of nearly 3 days.

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This story reminded me of a bunch of other books that I read or heard about, and the point is that there is some sort of topic or fragment in these stories that makes them so… so intriguing, and they draw me to them in their own sort of peculiar way. But despite the author’s efforts to give this book its’ own spin and deception, it just missed the mark by about 15 percent. Sorry about that, but I’ll explain why in a second:

The first thing that you should know about the book is that the setting keeps changing, chapter after chapter. Chapter one took place in the escape room, while chapter two highlighted the main events of about more than a year ago. And it keeps alternating from escape room to the past events, to escape room again, to the past events again. Each flashback in the story provides subtle hints and clues to all of the relationships between the 6 people trapped in the room, and the tension keeps building up, looking to see if people will actually try to gang up on others, while others will defend everybody, even if it means that they’ll have to die alone. But no one wants to take the chance of everybody dying. 

However, the book isn’t all bad- in fact, it’s quite interesting and overall, a pleasant read. It just fell short by a few things that I was hoping to find in this particular genre. This book is written in a way that is more high school contemporary with a pastiche of so-called friendship drama, misunderstandings, somewhat annoying romance, and a dash of mysteries and eerie occurrences. 

Rounding it all up, it comes back to the major wanting of darkness and thrilling plot twists which the book gave a mediocre amount of (which some people would find absolutely okay.) Rather than giving me nightmares, the book practically turned itself into a guidance counselor and became a teaching life moment by transitioning into themes like bullying, suicide, violence, and PTSD. I understand that people need to be aware of it, but seriously! I was expecting more of a frightening, nail-biting thriller instead of a proactive guidance novel.

All Your Twisted Secrets was told from the POV of one of the 6 main characters, who is the one and only, Amber Prescott. It is told in short bursts of present day and extended flashbacks of the present year that leads up to the night that she and the other 5 get locked up in the escape room. This constant flipping between past and present, was slowly diminishing my sense of urgency to find out who made the escape room possible. There was so much repetition, repetition, and repetition that I just wanted to skip ahead (but I didn’t, because I have integrity, uwu). 

Fortunately, there was a bunch of tea and secrets that got spilled urgently in the locked room and though the setup wasn’t entirely useless, because it showed how the characters were related and connected to each other, the big reveal wasn’t all that shocking because I already suspected it from the beginning. The wrap up chapters explained the motive behind the fake dinner and the locked room, as well as how the perpetrator of the entire scheme organized the whole plan. It was kind of unneeded, but I think it was okay to have all of the facts in one place.

The Characters (A short paragraphs):

I liked Amber quite a lot: she was highly passionate about music, scores, and in that way, she was a lot like me, because she didn’t just listen to crappy pop music, but also classical music, and music by old bands that I don’t think a lot of people know about anymore.

Sasha was a really annoying idiot who – at the end of the day – was revealed to only care about herself and her reputation as Queen Bee and one of the most popular and pretty girls in school. She also bullied a lot of characters, and was the reason for something really bad to happen.

Priya was a very straightforward girl who was also best friends with Amber up until a few months ago in the story, and she was one of the main people who was bullied into drinking and other peer pressure points by Sasha and some of the other people in the popular clique.

Scott was a drug dealer at the school, and he was illegally selling a specific drug to Sasha to help her focus on the SAT exam, and to also relieve her stress. He knows Amber from a long time ago, but now they aren’t as close as before.

Diego was a very brainy and [handsome] person in the story, and Amber had a major crush on him, despite the fact that she had a boyfriend and her dad and Diego’s dad were rivals in business.

And Robbie, Amber’s boyfriend who she’s planning to break up with, since he doesn’t actually respect her dreams of going to a music school and pursuing her long time wish of being a composer.

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Despite the commonness of the storyline and themes, this book was definitely a good read. I admit, it was more of a watered down version of the book I would’ve liked to read, but I enjoy these kinds of book, and I have yet to find my favorite… let’s hope it comes soon! Thanks for reading my review of this book, and I hope you all have a great time reading this book!