REVIEW: Deadly Little Secret by Laurie Faria Stolarz

Title: Deadly Little Secret (Touch #1)

Author: Laurie Faria Stolarz

Genre: Young Adult. Paranormal. Romance

Publication Date: December 23^rd 2008

Publisher: Hyperion

Format: Hardcover

Pages: 252

Rating: 3.5/5
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Some secrets shouldn't be kept...

Up until three months ago, everything in sixteen-year-old Camelia's life had been fairly ordinary: decent grades; an okay relationship with her parents; and a pretty cool part-time job at the art studio downtown. But when Ben, the mysterious new guy, starts junior year at her high school, Camelia's life becomes anything but ordinary.

Rumored to be somehow responsible for his ex-girlfriend's accidental death, Ben is immediately ostracized by everyone on campus. Except for Camelia. She's reluctant to believe the rumors, even when her friends try to convince her otherwise. She's inexplicably drawn to Ben and to his touch. But soon, Camelia is receiving eerie phone calls and strange packages with threatening notes. Ben insists she is in danger, and that he can help-but can he be trusted? She knows he's hiding something... but he's not the only one with a secret.

This book has been on my radar for a while now. I first picked this book up at the library on a whim about a year and a half ago, but I didn’t read it at the time. It wasn’t until I was watching a video by Alita of abookaffair about her Favourite Underrated Book Series (I’ve included the link to that video because she made this series sound amazing!) that I became interested in this series again. I borrowed this again pretty much the next day.

The book starts off kind of slow, and so it took me a while to actually get passed the first few chapters, but after that I read the rest of the book in a number of hours. The main character, Camelia, is alright. She’s nowhere near becoming one of my favourite characters, but at the same time she definitely isn’t the worst character I’ve ever read about. There were moments where I could really connect to her and understand sort of what she was going through, but then there were also times when her behaviour just drove me insane. I liked the friendship between Camelia, Kimmie and Wes- I liked how they were supportive of one another but they weren’t like super-amazing best friends all of the time. Sometimes things get in the way of friendships and I think the book showed that really well. The love interest, Ben, was also a bit so-so. Again, there were parts when I really liked him and some where I really didn’t.

The plot itself was enjoyable. I found it to be a little bit predictable- I had guessed who the stalker was going to be before it was revealed. For me, that was a little bit disappointing because I was hoping to be kept guessing until the last moment. I did really like the insert into the stalker’s mind, this reminded me a little of The Body Finder by Kimberly Derting, so that was a plus. Those particular parts were pretty creepy, but I think the story might have been helped along a bit with just a few more. Like I said, the story started off a bit slow and sometimes other parts were slow too. This being said, towards the end, everything happened so quickly that it ended up sort of glazing over the actual action of the story. I think this ended up taking away from the story. Lastly, there were parts that were just plain weird. As in, there were events within the story that just made no sense to me. I think maybe the story would have worked better without them.

All in all, I did enjoy the book. I suppose I was expecting a little bit more, but that being said, it was far from being completely terrible.