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 

(3.5 Stars)

I will admit I was a bit nervous going into this one because it had quite the mix of reviews.    But I always like to make my own opinions, and I am glad I did!

I was pleasantly surprised and was kept engaged from the first to last page.  This book kept me guessing with every turn of the page wondering what would happen next.  

For the last ten years, the small town of West Wilmer has been wondering why it took Dean Grant twenty-seven minutes to call 911 the night of his sister Pheobe’s death.    Someone knows what happened that night, someone who might finally be ready to tell the truth.  

𝙏𝙬𝙚𝙣𝙩𝙮 𝙎𝙚𝙫𝙚𝙣 𝙈𝙞𝙣𝙪𝙩𝙚𝙨 is told over multiple POV’s with flashback chapters to give us glimpses of that fateful night.   

It took me a bit to get a grasp on who was who, but once I did it was not hard to follow along with the story.  Every single person is unreliable and I didn’t know who or what to believe.  

I did have a bit of a hard time with all the characters because if I’m being honest, I hated every single one of them.  The only one I kind of liked and felt sorry for was June. 
And I felt like some aspects were very repetitive which made the middle drag on a little bit.  

But it was because of these unreliable characters that we had some very engaging conversations in our @tandemcollectiveglobal readalong group.  

All in all I enjoyed this one and look forward to what Tate writes next. 
Pick this up If you like small town thrillers with unreliable narrators.  

Thank you @penguinrandomca and @tandemcollectiveglobal for a #gifted copy of the book.

This book had way too many POV’s which took away from the story