SYNOPSIS
-Ten years ago, Phoebe Dean, a highschooler, was killed in a car accident on the way home from a party. Her brother, Grant Dean, was driving the car, and Becca was in the backseat. Grant waited 27 minutes to call the police.
-Now, the small town is still remembering Phoebe, and lots of people are still wondering what happened to her. A memorial is scheduled to remember her, and it brings a lot of questions.

MY THOUGHTS
-This was a major snooze fest. Truly, nothing actually happens in this book.
-The writing is not good, and I'm not sure why exactly this needed to be written.
-None of the characters are likeable, which is fine, but they also are not developed.
-The same thoughts are repeated over and over again.
-The ending was not satisfying, and it felt really cheap to me. 
-I read so many books in this genre, and this is not one I would recommend. It isn’t even a thriller or suspense.
-Even when we find out what happened to Phoebe, it is not satisfying.

TL;DR: ⭐️⭐️There’s too many books out there. I wouldn’t recommend this one. It isn’t even a thriller or suspense.

Thanks to Poisoned Pen Press and Netgalley for this digital ARC in exchange for an honest review. This book is out now.

    It took Phoebe's brother Grant 27 minutes to call 911 after a car crash on the bridge. On the same night, June's brother Wyatt goes missing. now 10 years later the truth about what happened that night will finally come to light.
    If I hadn't been so overwhelmed by the CRAZY of everyone in the book (I say that as a person with multiple mental health diagnoses and an almost complete psychology degree), I would have seen the truth sooner.

I did not guess the truth since Wyatt was supposedly there.

And it seemed like everyone whose POV it was from had some level of mental illness or was suffering from severe grief. I mean talk about unreliable narrators!
   None of the characters were very likable, June, but the rest ugh! The book was okay but not great.
 
 Narrator Rating: 3.5 stars
  The narrator did a decent job, but at 2.05x speed she pronounced some words very oddly, not sure if that was supposed to be a regional accent or if it was the speed at which I was listening. She did not do many tonal shifts for different characters. Though she was not too boring either. 

Elemental Levels:  Heartfelt-5/5   Helpful-1/5  Mystery-2/5     Predictability-4/5 Suspense-3/5 Tear- 3.5/5  Thrill-4/5

Twenty Seven Minutes is a suspense mystery told in multiple POVs and dual timeline. 

It started with a strong opening with a suspicious set of well developed characters that makes me wonder who to trust. 

 

While it started out great, the pacing turns slower as the story goes building up the suspense with unreliable narrator and also the flashbacks chapters to ten years ago, to the night Phoebe died. 

As for the characters, it’s hard to like them. At times, I feel sad toward them but their action makes me feel frustrated as well. But, considering the environment of the house they grew up as well as the pressure from parents and school, no wonder they had a hard time which eventually affected their mental health.   

 

The twist at the end wasn’t really that surprising since I was able to figured out early on before the big reveal. 

It ends with the truth finally out in the open, but I still feel slightly unsatisfied with that epilogue. 

I really wished it showed more of what happened after the truth was revealed especially to the culprit and also the town’s reaction, instead of only showing one person's reaction. 

 

Overall, for a debut novel this is pretty good. I enjoy reading this intense book despite the slow pacing to build up the suspense from the beginning until the end. 

I would recommend this to those who likes a slow-paced character driven mystery drama with unreliable narrators. 

 

 

⚠️ 𝐓𝐖: Death, grief, gaslighting, addiction, alcoholism, brief mention of drugs and cancer 

thank you netgalley, ashley tate & poisoned pen press for providing me with the arc for twenty-seven minutes

—

the description of the book really peaked my interest. the prologue and epilogue were both beautifully written. the prologue really grabbed my attention and pulled me in. the plot twist at the end was something i hadn’t been expecting at all, i sat in my bed shocked at how i hadn’t pieced the twist together in my own mind. i think it was a very unique idea (or maybe i haven’t read as many crime thrillers as i think i have) & i thought it was executed flawlessly, i just wish that it had been revealed a little bit earlier on in the book to keep it interesting.

the pacing was quite slow. like i mentioned before, the prologue really drew me in, but after about 10-15% in, it draggeddddd until the last 10%. not sure if this was done to build suspense or what but i was skimming certain people’s povs/chapters and that’s probably the reason i finished this book so quickly, otherwise it would’ve definitely dragged out longer. 

i liked the time jumps going back ten years to the night of the accident for backstory but i didn’t like that in the present day, the characters were still living & acting like they were teenagers when they were actually like thirty. they also kinda acted and spoke like phoebe’s death was like a week ago & still fresh rather than ten years ago.

i wouldn’t say the cast was stale but they were unlikeable as fuck. grant gave like major fuck boy energy but double the manipulation/gaslighting & anger issues. but the WORST one had to be fucking becca. the pick me girl vibes that i got from her was enough to make me want to skip her chapters completely, but i also love drama so i sat through it. “i have trauma too i was there why is no one feeling bad for me 🥺🥺🥺” girl. by far the most unlikeable character for me. i didn’t really connect with any of the characters but by the end of the book, june was the character i had the least amount of complaints about. also..is it just me or were grant & phoebe very ….. incesty??? like the way she was so possessive of him & how other characters described grant’s love for her, i was like.. oh! okay then.

anyway to wrap up since i just be yapping at this point, thank you again to netgalley, ashley tate and poisoned pen press for providing me with the arc for this book

I’ll start with what I liked. I loved the look at grief in this book. Between Grant, his mom and really the whole town grieving Phoebe and June losing her mom and feeling alone in her sadness, I thought the way the author wrote about grief was the best part of the book. The big twist at the end, I probably should have seen coming, but I didn’t and I did think it was a pretty good one. It made sense and everything fit together pretty well. I did also enjoy the back and forth timelines and the multiple POVs. Now onto what didn’t work for me and it’s a big one: the characters. There was not a single character that made me care about them. Grant and Wyatt were frustratingly vague and mysterious. Becca had her moments of fascination, but I honestly just wanted to shake her for the majority of the book. June, I had a bit of sympathy for, but she had absolutely no personality. Also, there was so much opportunity to dig in deeper with these characters like Grant’s relationship with his mom and Becca’s mental health issues, but they’re felt glossed over to me. And PHOEBE. My god. She was obnoxious. How she had that whole town in the palm of her hand, I’ll never know. Overall, this was a miss for me, but again I did appreciate how well the topic of grief was done in this book. 

Thank you to NetGalley and Poisoned Pen Press for an advanced digital copy in exchange for an honest review.